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The Earth's Story: II 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

FREDERIC ARNOLD KUMMER 


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THE EARTH’S STORY 

As Narrated Quite Simply for 
Young Readers 

By FREDERIC ARNOLD KUMMER 

« 

Volume One 

THE FIRST DAYS OF MAN 
Volume Two 

THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 
Volume Three 

THE FIRST DAYS OF HISTORY 

Each volume illustrated and 
with a frontispiece in color 














THK FIRST BOOK 




THE FIRST DAYS 
OF KNOWLEDGE 

AS NARRATED QUITE SIMPLY 
FOR YOUNG READERS 

BY 

FREDERIC ARNOLD KUMMER 


ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


Cb 30 1 

, K 1 

(JCf-M 2 - 


COPYRIGHT, 1923, 

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 





THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 
-B- 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


DEC 22 23 

©CU705441 



'Vvo -'y' 







PREFACE FOR PARENTS 

In the initial volume of “The Earth’s Story,” 
“The First Days of Man,” the writer undertook 
to set forth for the benefit of young readers the 
salient facts in the development of Man and his 
civilisation from the beginning of the world up 
to the point at which our primitive ancestors, 
emerging from the shadows of a savage past, 
began to show those glimmerings of intelligence 
which marked their first great step upward from 
the beasts. 

In treating this development as a continuous 
and dramatically unfolding story, the writer’s 
hope was to interest the growing child in the 
acquiring of knowledge along orderly and under¬ 
standable lines, so that he or she might not only 

[v] 






PREFACE FOR PARENTS 


obtain a graphic picture of Man’s upward prog¬ 
ress, but would at the same time acquire, by 
reason of this orderly presentation, the habit of 
logical thought. 

The method employed is one which the writer 
has followed with gratifying success in the case 
of his own children, and depends primarily upon 
the simple device of linking each fact, as it is 
presented, to some other fact or set of facts, pre¬ 
viously acquired, so that the child is enabled to 
build his framework of knowledge intelligently, 
rather than at haphazard. 

Many parents are prone to forget that the 
fundamental bases of mind and character are laid 
by the child during infancy. Too often the 
schools are blamed for failure to develop in the 
youthful mind habits of thought which should 
have been implanted there by the parents before 
the child had gone to school at all. 

But to present facts, simply as facts, to young 
children is not an easy matter. They are apt to 
find such things dull, uninteresting. Only by 
treating them as steps in a great dramatic story 
can we hope to enlist the child’s interest. We 

[vi] 



PREFACE FOR PARENTS 

must do more than tell him that the Pyramids 
were built; we must show him a dramatic and 
colourful picture of the people who built them, 
and why they built them, and how. In this way 
the imagination of the child is stimulated; he not 
only acquires his facts, but he begins to think 
about them, which is, in many ways, far more 
important, even, than the facts themselves. 

There is a tendency in certain groups of edu¬ 
cators to frown upon any methods of teaching 
not strictly scientific. Such groups would bar all 
fairy tales, all methods of appealing to the imagi¬ 
nation of the child not invested with the cold and 
mathematical accuracy of twice two making four. 
Yet it may be pointed out that nothing creative 
can be accomplished in the world, from construct¬ 
ing a mud fort to erecting a Woolworth Building, 
to say nothing of the great enterprise behind it, 
without imagination. It is a priceless possession, 
as necessary in inventing a can-opener as in dis¬ 
covering an unknown planet. The Earth’s story 
is a tremendous and imposing drama, and if the 
writer has made use of imaginary scenes and char¬ 
acters in order to present it interestingly to the 

[vii] 


PREFACE FOR PARENTS 


mind of the child, he has done so intentionally, 
and with no thought of apologising for it. The 
nomad girl, Nadji, weaving the first coloured 
rug, the Chinese boy, Ling, inventing the first 
water-clock, are of course purely imaginary char¬ 
acters. But if, through reading of their adven¬ 
tures, the child comes to understand how and 
when and why rug-weaving began, and water- 
clocks came into use, our purpose has been ac¬ 
complished. He has begun to think about these 
things; about the great textile industry, about 
methods of telling the time, and he is able to fit 
them into their proper places in the structure he 
is building. 

Mere knowledge of facts, without the habit of 
thinking about them, of applying them, is like the 
proverbial load of books on an ass’s back. Other¬ 
wise one might as well attempt to educate the 
child by requiring him to memorise the dictionary. 
There is too much of this parrot-like tendency in 
modern methods of education; too much attention 
to facts, too little to thinking intelligently about 
them. Students of a hundred years ago, with a 
thorough knowledge of half a dozen great books, 


PREFACE FOR PARENTS 


were probably better trained, mentally, than the 
average child of to-day, with his surface knowl¬ 
edge of everything under the sun, from Abyssinia 
to zoophytes. 

In “The First Days of Knowledge” the writer 
has attempted to present, in some logical and con¬ 
nected form, the progress of Man’s mental and 
material development during that period which, 
for want of a better name, we may call the dawn 
of civilisation. It is his hope that the young 
reader may find it interesting as well as instruc¬ 
tive. 

Frederic Arnold Kummer. 
Catonsville , Maryland . 





CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Thinkers.17 

II The Wandering Tribes ... 24 

III The Bronze Sword ... .36 

IV The Magic Metal . . .47 

V The Water Clock .... 68 

VI The Bright Rug.84 

VII Silver Moon’s Silk Dress ... 97 

VIII The Ox-Cart . . . . .112 

IX The Valley of Clay .... 126 

X Making the Sun Work for Us . . 137 

XI The Battering Ram .... 147 

XII The Writing on the Walls . .167 

XIII The Healers .180 

XIV The King’s Messenger . . .189 

XV The Traders.211 

XVI The Statue of the King . . . 228 

[xi] 

























CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

XVII Slaves.245 

XVIII The Golden Girdle .... 256 

XIX Gods and Men.271 

XX Music.283 

XXI Numbers . 291 

XXII A Day in Egypt 4,000 Years Ago . 301 


[xii] 




ILLUSTRATIONS 


The First Book. Frontispiece 

TAGB 

The Early Peoples of Europe, Asia and 

Africa (a map).26-27 

Tilling the Soil in Ancient Times ... 33 

Tubal Beat the White-hot Bar into a Sword 43 

The People of That Country Made Wonder¬ 
ful Glass.55 

Ancient Egyptian Ships.61 

Early Ways of Telling the Time ... 71 

Nadji’s Father Was Chief of a Nomad Tribe 85 

Lotus Bud Worked All Day, Spinning the 

Fragile Silk.105 

The First Sawmill.113 

A Lake-Dweller’s Home. 119 

Farming in the Clay Country . . . .133 

Sargon, the Great King, Was Angry . .149 

Catapult Used for Hurling Stones . . 161 

The Writing on the Walls . . . .173 

War!.191 

Down to That City Come Caravans . . . 215 

Ancient Coins ..223 

[xiii] 












ILLUSTRATIONS 


Ani Set His Chisel Against the Stone 
Slaves of the King .... 
Gurm Was a Skilful Trapper . 

They Worshipped Idols of Stone . 
Before the Days of the Tractor . 
Dolls and Toys of Long Ago . 


PAGE 

237 

247 

261 

273 

293 

307 


[xiv] 



THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 





/ 




' 





THE FIRST DAYS OF 
KNOWLEDGE 


CHAPTER I 

THE THINKERS 

Mother Nature and the Sun were looking 
down at the great round Earth. 

“My little people are going ahead very fast 
now,” Mother Nature said. “So many of them 
are beginning to use their brains—to think.” 

“I haven’t noticed that they are doing very 
much,” replied the Sun, glancing down his long, 
bright rays. 

“That is because you haven’t been paying at¬ 
tention to them. The Earth is very small, I 
know, compared with some of the other worlds 
you shine on, but if you will watch the Earth 

[17] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

People carefully, you will see that what I have 
told you is true.” 

So the Sun gazed down at the tiny Earth as 
it turned around and around every day in the 
sunshine, and this is what he saw. 

The people who lived in the valley of the caves 
had long ago overflowed their first home, and 
wandering tribes of them had begun to spread 
all over the face of the earth. 

This they had done because, as the years and 
the centuries went by, there was neither room 
nor food enough for them all in the valley, nor 
in the other valleys and hills which surrounded 
it, and so the strongest and bravest and most 
daring of them set out across mountains and 
rivers and plains and even the sea itself, to find 
new homes where food and game would be more 
plentiful, and easier to get. 

Some of them settled on the shores of the ocean 
—the Great Water as they called it—and learned 
to make fish-hooks, and nets of twisted grass, and 
canoes, and even boats with sails. 

Others found homes in fertile valleys, planting 
and raising grain and sweet roots for food, mak- 

[ 18 ] 




THE THINKERS 


ing jars and bowls of clay, burnt hard in the fire, 
taming animals to work for them and feed them 
with their milk. 

Still others became nomads or shepherds, 
wandering over the wide grassy plains with their 
herds and flocks, living in tents, riding wild horses 
they had tamed, knowing nothing of the sea. 

All these different tribes and peoples had 
learned a great deal. They had fire, and cooked 
their food over it. They knew how to make fine 
tools and weapons of flint, how to work in wood 
and carve stone, how to trap and fish, and hunt 
with spears and bows and arrows, tipped with 
flint or bone. And finally some of them discov¬ 
ered the metals, at first gold, and copper, and tin, 
and later on found out how to make bronze, and 
brass. 

They had begun not only to gain knowledge, 
but to store it up, and it is this knowledge, stored 
up by the early peoples so many thousands of 
years ago that makes it possible for us to be civi¬ 
lised human beings to-day. We owe a great debt 
of thanks to these early thinkers for what they 
did for us. Had it not been for them, we would 

[ 19 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

all be living like savages. It is to learn the things 
they discovered, that we go to school. How many 
children are there who think, when they read a 
sentence like this, printed on a page, that the 
minds of millions and millions of men have 
laboured, in the past, to work out and make pos¬ 
sible for us the simple little letters of the alphabet 
in which it is written? For thousands and thou¬ 
sands and thousands of years this has been going 
on, and everything we see and have about us we 
owe, in the beginning, to the work and the brains 
of these unknown women and men. It ought to 
make us see that the chance to learn what these 
forgotten thinkers worked out for us is something 
to be thankful for. We should not look on it as a 
task. Just suppose we had to work all these 
things out for ourselves! 

These early peoples all over the world, in learn¬ 
ing about pottery, and boats, and cattle, and 
weaving, and glass, were, as we have seen, storing 
up knowledge for us, but for a long time this 
knowledge was in constant danger of being lost. 

You can easily see that if one tribe found out 
how to raise grain and make it into bread, and an- 

[ 20 ] 


THE THINKERS 

other tribe, wild and fierce, living on the flesh of 
animals, came along and attacked the first tribe 
and destroyed it, the tilings that the people of the 
first tribe had learned would be lost. And even 
when a tribe was able to live in peace there was 
no way for a long time for the older people of 
the tribe to hand down what they had learned to 
the younger ones, except by telling them. They 
could not write down what they had learned in 
books, as we do to-day, for others to read, because 
they knew nothing about writing, and such things 
as books had never been heard of. And in the 
beginning they did not even know how to speak, 
as we do now. They had a few words, of course, 
names for the sun, and fire, and water, and birds 
and animals, and other simple things of that sort, 
but they did not have words enough to tell any 
one how to do this, or that, and the only way the 
young ones learned how to do things, such as 
chipping flint or tanning leather, was to watch 
what the older men and women in the tribe did, 
and imitate them by doing the same. 

So you can see that in the storing up of knowl¬ 
edge in those early days two things were very 

[ 21 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


much needed. One—the first one—was a spoken 
language, words that people could use to tell 
other people about things, and which the other 
people could store up in their minds, and remem¬ 
ber, and carry away with them to still other 
people and tribes. For a very long time this 
was the only way in which the things the first 
men learned could be preserved and handed down 
from father to son, from one generation to an¬ 
other. 

It was not, as you can see, a very good way. 
In such simple matters as pottery making, or 
weaving, or planting grain it was well enough, 
but when it came to more complicated things, 
to telling, for instance, of events that had hap¬ 
pened before, of what this or that leader or tribe 
or people had done, it was not good at all, for, as 
the years and hundreds of years rolled by, the 
stories that fathers told their sons got warped and 
twisted and changed, so that in the end they were 
quite different from what had really happened 
and not true at all. Some of these stories, or 
myths, as we call them, we can read even to-day. 
There is the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, 

[ 22 ] 






THE THINKERS 


for instance, or of Achilles, whose mother dipped 
him in the River Styx, or of Hercules and his 
labours. They seem nothing but fairy stories to 
us now, and yet, beneath most of them there must 
have been, long ago, some grain of truth. 

So you can understand that in gaining, and 
particularly in preserving knowledge, the early 
men did not have an easy time of it, and it was 
not until the art of writing became known that 
true records of things could be kept, and handed 
down from one generation to another. 

We are now going to read about some of the 
first big steps that the early men took in their 
search for knowledge, and because these first 
steps were nearly always taken by persons who 
used their brains, who thought about things, we 
can call them the Thinkers. 

When we remember how much they have done 
for us, it ought to make us want to be thinkers 
too, in order to hand down something of value to 
those who come after us. 


[ 23 ] 


CHAPTER II 


THE WANDERING TRIBES 

From the time of the early Stone Age, with its 
tools and weapons of roughly chipped flint, down 
to the days when Man began the use of bronze, 
many thousands and tens of thousands of years 
passed. All through this long period the differ¬ 
ent tribes of men were slowly spreading over the 
face of the earth, even to such distant lands as 
America, Australia and the Islands of the Pa¬ 
cific. 

How they got to these far-off countries we do 
not know, but we do know that in those days the 
surface of the earth was very different from the 
way it is now. Many places now covered with 
water were then dry land. Huge glaciers of ice, 
spreading out thousands of miles from the poles, 
took a great deal of water from the ocean. Earth¬ 
quakes and volcanic explosions raised and sunk 

[ 24 ] 


THE WANDERING TRIBES 

I 

continents. Scientists believe that the thousands 
of islands in the South Pacific are all that is left 
of a once great body of land extending from Aus¬ 
tralia to South America. Prehistoric men may 
have walked on foot around the world. Very, 
very long ago there were people—wild and sav¬ 
age people—in almost all the warmer parts of 
the earth. 

But it was about the shores of the Mediter¬ 
ranean Sea that men began to take the first steps 
upward from a savage state. One of the earliest 
peoples of which we have any knowledge, the 
Cro-Magnons, roamed through Europe tens of 
thousands of years ago, hunting, killing wild 
horses for food, making rude pictures on the 
walls of their caves. After a time they dis¬ 
appeared, and it is thought that they wandered 
eastward into what is now Siberia, and may even 
have crossed to America by way of Bering 
Straits, to form the ancestors of the Indians, and 
of the Mayas and Aztecs of Mexico. Of this, 
however, we cannot be sure. 

After them came a dark-haired, dark-skinned 
race which grew up around the shores of the 

[ 25 ] 





[ 26 ] 


THE EARLY PEOPLES OF 
















EUROPE, ASIA AND AFRICA 


[ 27 ] 

















THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


Mediterranean and spread north through west¬ 
ern Europe as far as the British Isles, and east 
all the way to India and the Malay Peninsula. 

Soon we find rising from the mists of the past 
three great civilisations, all beginning in coun¬ 
tries close to the Mediterranean Sea. The first 
and probably the oldest of these began in the clay 
country of Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates 
and Tigris rivers, the country of the ancient city 
of Babylon, as you will see from the map. This 
far-off civilisation extends back some eight thou¬ 
sand years. 

Not very much later, the Egyptians, that great 
people living along the banks of the Nile, in 
Africa, began to build a splendid civilisation of 
their own. Their history, too, as is shown by 
relics dug from the ruins of ancient cities and 
tombs, reaches many thousands of years back 
into the past. 

A third great civilisation grew up on the Island 
of Crete, in the Mediterranean Sea. So far we 
do not know as much about it as we do of the 
other two, but enough has been found out to 
show that the people of Crete were very little if 

[ 28 ] 




THE WANDERING TRIBES 


any behind the Egyptians in their knowledge of 
the arts and in their way of living. They were 
a rich and powerful nation, and spread their 
colonies all along the shores of the Mediter¬ 
ranean. 

Later came the Phoenicians, a great trading 
and sea people, who built the ancient city of Tyre, 
and founded Carthage. 

While all this was going on, there had begun to 
grow, in the forest country of Central Europe, 
a tribe of fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed 
people, who lived as barbarians, knowing nothing 
of the great civilisations to the south of them. 
Slowly they began to spread eastward, into the 
mountain country of western Asia, around the 
Black and Caspian Seas. Later on, as they grew 
stronger and stronger, they were to move both 
north and south, and finally form the great white 
race of to-day. 

Upon the wide grassy plains of south Russia 
fierce nomads grazed their flocks. There were 
dark-skinned people in India, and Mongolians, 
with yellow skins, in China, with a very ancient 
civilisation about which we do not know very 

[ 29 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

much. And in the jungles of Africa were the 
black races, which made no attempt to become 
civilised at all. 

All these places and peoples of which we have 
spoken you will find clearly shown on the accom¬ 
panying map. 

As you read the chapter about Tubal and his 
bronze sword, and the other chapters which follow 
it, you must not suppose that the things you read 
of all took place at the same time, or in the order 
in which you find them in this book. In writing 
about Man’s early discoveries in the field of 
knowledge it is impossible to say that this par¬ 
ticular thing was discovered first, and that one 
second, and so on, because thinking men were 
at work on almost all these things from the very 
earliest times, in many different countries and 
places. But while we do not know the order in 
which the first great steps in the gaining of 
knowledge were made, we do know that many 
thousands of years ago, perhaps four or five thou¬ 
sand years before Christ, men were beginning to 
write, to invent ways of measuring time, to ir¬ 
rigate their fields and gardens, to weave bright 

[ 30 ] 


THE WANDERING TRIBES 

coloured rugs, to use metals, to make use of water 
wheels, and wheels for wagons, to build great 
temples to their gods, to carve splendid statues, 
to make music by means of wind and stringed 
instruments, to use weights and measures and 
numbers, and to do a great many other things 
which form the groundwork of our present-day 
civilisation. 

Look at the map as you begin to read about 
Tubal and his bronze sword. Picture him com¬ 
ing down from the mountain country between the 
Black and the Caspian seas, cutting across the 
northern part of the clay country, and arriving 
at the Phoenician city of Tyre, then just a small 
village. When Tubal made his journey, civilisa¬ 
tion was well under way, not only in the southern 
part of the clay country, the land of Sumer, of 
which we shall read later, but also in Egypt, and 
in Crete. We have told of Tubal first, because 
the discovery of bronze was of such vast impor¬ 
tance to the world at that time. 

In the chapter about the water clock we jump 
all the way to far-off China, a journey which in 
those days would have taken many months to 

[ 31 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


make, if indeed it could have been made at all. 
Then we come back to the nomad tribes of west¬ 
ern Asia, to see how rugs were made. 

Again we go back to China, and read about 
Silver Moon’s silk dress, because both the water 
clock, and the use of silk, we owe to the ancient 
Chinese. 

Then we take a look at the savage, fair-skinned 
men who were growing up in the forests of Cen¬ 
tral Europe. They were just barbarians, then, 
far behind the dark-skinned peoples to the south 
and east. 

Next we go down into the Valley of Clay, the 
earliest civilisation of all, and see how men began 
to use the water of rivers to make their gardens 
grow, and how they made the sun work for them. 
In the history of the clay country, too, we learn 
about battering rams, and other weapons of war, 
and about the beginning of the art of writing on 
tablets of clay. 

After that we read of medicine, of ways of 
spreading the news, of the traders of Egypt, and 
Tyre, and Crete, of the sculptors of Egypt and 
other countries, carving great statues of kings, 

[ 32 ] 





k 




TILLING THE SOIL IN ANCIENT TIMES 

[ 33 ] 















THE WANDERING TRIBES 


and gods, of music, and numbers, and many other 
things. 

What you must bear in mind, as you read the 
different chapters, is not that these things took 
place one after the other, as you come to them, 
but that they were all going on at about the same 
time, some a thousand years earlier, some a thou¬ 
sand years later, but all, during that wonderful 
chapter in the Earth’s Story which extends from 
the dawn of civilisation down to the beginning of 
what we call history. 

Remember, too, as you look at the map, that 
practically all knowledge of any importance was 
being gathered in the few countries you see 
marked upon it. The great outside world was 
in darkness, with the possible exception of some 
small tribes such as the Mayas, in eastern Mexico. 
It was from the peoples of the countries about the 
Mediterranean Sea that most of our knowledge 
has come. 


[ 35 ] 


CHAPTER III 


THE BRONZE SWORD 

Tubal the metal-worker stood beside his forge, 
a heavy stone hammer in his hand. The anvil at 
which he worked was also of stone, a great black¬ 
ened rock with a flat top. 

He was a young man, broad-shouldered and 
strong. About his waist he wore a leather apron, 
but his arms and chest were bare. 

Behind him was a forge, built of rough square 
stones, and the fire in it was made of charcoal. 
At one side was a bellows of skins, and when 
Tubal moved the handle of the bellows up and 
down, a strong blast of air was forced into the 
fire, making the charcoal glow with a fierce white 
heat. 

Tubal put down his hammer and took from the 
anvil a mass of silver-white metal on which he had 
been beating. It was a lump of tin, and Tubal, 

[ 36 ] 


THE BRONZE SWORD 


after looking at it for a few moments, threw it on 
the ground in disgust. Then he sat down and 
began to eat some barley cakes and dried goat’s 
meat he took from a leather sack at his waist. 

The reason for Tubal’s disgust was this. He 
was a famous worker in metals, and made knives, 
daggers, hammer and axe heads, and ornaments 
of many sorts out of copper, and silver, and gold. 
But try as he would he was not able to make a 
sword of copper which would satisfy his father 
and the other men of the tribe. The soft copper 
blades would bend, and even when ground to a 
sharp edge on a gritty stone, they would not stay 
sharp, but soon lost their edges and became dull 
and blunted. 

Copper is a soft metal, and Tubal had never 
been able to find a way to toughen and harden it. 
So he was always on the lookout for some new 
metal, harder than the gold and silver and copper 
with which he worked. 

Whenever travellers from far-off places came 
through the village he would ask them if they 
knew of any other metals, but they always shook 
their heads and told him they did not. 

[ 37 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


But the night before there had come to the vil¬ 
lage a traveller from the south, telling of strange 
sights he had seen—of dark men who sailed in 
ships, with oars along the sides, and sails of 
purple cloth, who lived in a wonderful island 
across the sea. 

One of these men had bartered with him, the 
traveller said, giving him an armlet of strange 
white metal, in exchange for a woollen rug. He 
showed the armlet to Tubal, who bought it from 
him for a copper axe-head. 

The next day Tubal took the bit of strange 
metal to his forge and began to beat on it with 
his great stone hammer, but he soon found, much 
to his disappointment, that the new metal was 
softer even than the copper with which he usually 
worked, and of no use at all for making such 
things as knives and swords. That was why he 
had thrown it down on the ground. 

But as he ate his barley cakes and meat Tubal 
began to think. He had often, in the past, tried 
to make new metals out of the old ones, melting 
together gold and silver, or silver and copper, and 

[ 38 ] 


THE BRONZE SWORD 


forging from the mixtures bright chains and 
girdles, anklets, and handles for knives. 

So, finding the lump of tin of no use for sword 
making, he took it from the ground where he had 
thrown it and tossed it into one of the tall narrow 
clay pots or crucibles he used in making and melt¬ 
ing up his various mixtures. 

To the piece of tin, which was not bigger than 
the palm of his hand, he added four or five good- 
sized scraps of copper, and then buried the pot 
up to its neck in the red charcoal. This done, he 
began to pump his bellows, singing a queer, wild 
chant as he worked the bellows’ arm up and 
down. 

The strong blast of air soon caused the bed of 
coals to blaze up. Tubal added fresh charcoal, 
pumping away until the clay pot began to turn 
first a deep red, then an orange, and, slowly, grew 
white hot. 

The mixture of copper and tin softened, and 
soon began to bubble and blaze, giving off tiny 
flames of green, and yellow and blue. Then 
Tubal quickly made a little narrow mould in a 

[ 39 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

bed of soft clay, after which he took a flat copper 
spoon and skimmed from the surface of the 
molten mixture the scum of dirt which had col¬ 
lected there. 

When all was ready he lifted the pot from the 
fire by means of a pair of hooked tongs and 
poured the liquid metal into the little trench or 
mould he had made in the clay. 

When the metal had cooled for a while, Tubal, 
eager to see how the new mixture looked, threw 
a bowl of water over it and presently lifted it 
from the mould. It was now a rough, narrow 
bar, about eighteen inches long and as thick 
through as his thumb. Tubal took it in his hands, 
holding it by each end, and tried to bend it, ex¬ 
pecting that, like the other mixtures he had made 
it would be soft and pliable. But, to his surprise, 
it would not bend the way a bar of copper would 
have done, but instead held its shape firmly. 

Tubal was very much puzzled, for he had never 
seen a bar of metal like this before. And while 
he did not yet know it, he had discovered a new 
substance called bronze, which is made of a mix¬ 
ture of copper and tin. It is a strange fact, but 

[ 40 ] 


THE BRONZE SWORD 

none the less true, that two soft metals, such as 
copper and tin, when melted together, form 
bronze, which is much harder and tougher than 
either of them. This new metal, or alloy, as mix¬ 
tures of different metals are called, was later on 
to prove of great value to early men. Not only 
was it suited to making strong, sharp swords, 
spears and other weapons to be used in war, but 
it could be made into tools with which to work 
wood and stone, into arrow heads for the hunts¬ 
men, knives for all sorts of purposes, shields, hel¬ 
mets, bowls, cups, statues and ornaments. In 
fact, so useful was this new metal that the age 
in which it was used is often called the Age of 
Bronze, and came between the late Stone Age 
and the time when men discovered and began to 
use that greatest of all metals, iron. But we must 
not suppose that these different Ages came to all 
the peoples and nations of the earth at once. 
Some went ahead very quickly, from stone to 
copper and bronze, and then to iron, while others 
were still struggling along with their spears and 
axes of flint, just as some savage races of the 
earth are struggling even to-day. 

[ 41 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

Tubal took his bar of bronze and thrust it into 
the fire. Then he blew on the coals with his bel¬ 
lows, singing again the wild song he called the 
Song of the Sword. Tubal was happy. He felt 
that he had done a very wonderful thing, in find¬ 
ing out how to make this new metal, and so he 
sang joyously as he worked. 

Presently he drew the glowing bar from the 
furnace, and holding one end of it in a thick 
scrap of leather, beat upon the white-hot metal 
with his hammer, shaping it into a sword. 

All the rest of the day he worked, pumping at 
his bellows, heating and hammering, forging the 
bar into a flat, curved blade, pointing it roughly, 
bringing the edges down as fine and thin as his 
hammer would permit. At last, his work done, he 
thrust the blade into a jar of water to cool it, and 
then swung it about in his hand. Some young 
men of the tribe, returning home from the fields 
with their flocks, stopped to speak with him, but 
Tubal did not tell them anything about the new 
metal he had discovered. This, he felt, was a 
secret to be kept and guarded very carefully, and 
only to be handed down to others when he was 

[ 42 ] 



TUBAL BEAT THE WHITE-HOT BAR INTO A SWORD 

[ 43 ] 










THE BRONZE SWORD 

himself too old and feeble to work any longer at 
his forge. 

The next day Tubal got some flat pieces of 
coarse, gritty stone and began to polish the 
weapon with them, working very carefully, first 
along the thicker, middle part of the blade, then 
out to the cutting edges, grinding and rubbing, 
hour after hour, until the sword was bright and 
clean from end to end, and so sharp that when he 
whirled it against the branch of a young tree the 
blade cut through the wood as though it had been 
soft clay. No copper sword would have done 
that, he knew, without the edge being turned and 
blunted, yet the blade of bronze was as keen and 
bright as before. 

Tubal now forged about the upper end of the 
blade, where the bar had not been flattened, a ring 
of copper, and above this he fitted on each side a 
smooth piece of bone, held in place with copper 
rivets, to form a handle. Then, when all was 
done, he carried the sword to his father, Lamech, 
and placed it in his hands. 

“For you, my father,” he said, “I have forged 
a sword the like of which no man hath seen be- 

[ 45 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


fore. With it shall you slay your enemies, and 
cause all men to fear you.” 

Tubal’s father took the sword and looked at it 
carefully, and what he saw pleased him very 
much. He strode over to the fire where some of 
the women were about to kill a young sheep for 
the evening’s meal and told them to stand aside. 
Then with one sweep of the sword he cut the head 
from the sheep so cleanly that the animal’s body 
still stood on its four legs for an instant while the 
severed head fell to the ground. Lamech tested 
the keen edge of the blade with his thumb, then 
turned to Tubal. 

“Tubal, my son,” he said, “from this day on 
shall you be called the greatest worker in metals 
among men, for you have done that which no man 
hath done before.” 

And this is the story of Tubal, the metal 
worker, and of the first bronze sword. 


[46] 





CHAPTER IV 


THE MAGIC METAL 

Hor, the head-man of Tubal’s tribe, was not 
pleased when he learned that Tubal’s father had 
a better sword than any he possessed himself. So 
he sent for the young smith, and received him sit¬ 
ting on a bench in front of his tent. 

“Tubal,” he said, “make me a blade like the one 
you have made for your father, Lamech.” 

Now Tubal was confused, for he knew that 
what Hor had asked of him was impossible. 

“That I cannot do,” he replied, shaking his 
head. 

“Why not?” The head-man scowled, for he 
did not think that Tubal was telling him the 
truth. “If you can forge one, why can you not 
forge another?” 

Then Tubal told Hor about the magic metal he 
had bought from the traveller who came from the 
south, and explained how this metal, when melted 

[ 47 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

with copper, made the copper tough and hard, but 
still Hor did not believe him, and thought that he 
wanted his father to have a better weapon than 
any one else in the tribe. 

“Go you forth and search for this magic metal 
of which you speak,” the head-man said harshly, 
“and come not back before me without it, lest you 
die by the sword you have made.” Then he rose, 
with a black look, and went into his tent. 

Tubal went away, greatly troubled, and sat be¬ 
side his forge, wondering what he should do. 
After a time there came to him his half brother 
Jubal. 

“What troubles you, my brother?” Jubal 
asked. 

Tubal told him the story of the sword. And 
Jubal listened eagerly, for he, too, had envied 
Lamech the keen blade, and wanted Tubal to 
make him one like it. 

Now Jubal, who spent his days watching his 
brother Jabal’s cattle, had made for himself a 
pipe of reeds, on which he played sweet music, 
while alone in the fields, or in the evenings, when 

[ 48 ] 


THE MAGIC METAL 


the men and girls of the tribe danced about the 
camp fires. And he thought a great deal about 
the strangers who sometimes came to the village, 
bringing with them ivory, and spices, and sweet 
perfumes in tiny bottles of glass, exchanging 
them for leather work, and carpets of wool, and 
shaggy ponies for their journeys. And when he 
heard their stories of far-off lands it seemed to 
him that nothing could be so fine as to go and see 
for himself all this new and wonderful world that 
lay beyond the snow-capped mountains to the 
south. 

So when he heard Tubal’s story about the 
magic metal he laughed aloud, and blew a little 
tune he had made on his pipes, and Tubal gazed 
at him, wondering. 

“Why do you laugh?” he asked. 

“From joy,” Jubal said, “because of what you 
have told me. Let us go, O Tubal, you and I to¬ 
gether, to seek this strange metal in the far-off 
lands to the south. We will set out to-morrow, 
with the rising of the sun.” 

At first Tubal would not listen, and told his 

[ 49 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

brother he would go alone, but Jubal, with his 
golden tongue persuaded him, and they made 
ready for their journey. 

The sun had not yet climbed above the hill 
tops when Tubal and Jubal set out on their small 
shaggy ponies. They wore caps and belted coats 
of undyed wool, and their weapons were knives 
and spears and curved bows made of horn, very 
short and strong, slung about their shoulders 
along with many copper-tipped arrows in quiv¬ 
ers of leather. Upon a third pony they carried 
provisions of dried goat’s flesh, and cakes of 
crushed grain, and wild honey in pottery jars, 
together with a store of knives and ornaments 
of copper and silver and gold, and bright-col¬ 
oured jewels to be used in trading with the peo¬ 
ple of the far countries they expected to visit. 
So they rode through the narrow pass in the 
mountains which led toward the south and west. 

The way was rough and hard, yet in spite 
of the rocks, and streams, and forests they were 
able to follow the narrow trail which had been 
made by those who travelled between the moun¬ 
tains and the sea. The sun gave them their 

[ 50 ] 


THE MAGIC METAL 


direction by day, and the stars by night, and the 
flames of their camp fires kept wild beasts away. 

Here and there along the road they came to 
tiny villages with people of their own tribe, 
whose language they could understand. These 
made them welcome, for it was the custom in 
those days to treat travellers kindly, and feed 
them and give them shelter for the night. But 
after many days the face of the country began 
to change, the mountain slopes gave way to pleas¬ 
ant rolling hills, and these in turn to a flat coun¬ 
try watered by great rivers, where the people 
lived in huts of sun-dried clay. 

These people were not ruddy and fair, like 
Tubal and his brother, but brown-skinned and 
smaller, speaking a different language. They, 
too, wore garments made of wool, but they 
shaved their heads, and while they had goats 
and sheep, like the men from the mountains, they 
did not have horses, although they had seen 
them, from time to time, ridden by travellers 
going to and fro between the hill country and the 
sea. 

They were a peaceable folk, and greeted Tubal 

[ 51 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

and his brother kindly, giving them meat, and 
fruits and wine. And although Tubal could not 
speak their language, he made them understand 
by signs that he was a worker in metals, after 
which they brought their own smiths before him, 
so that he might see their work. Tubal found 
gold and silver, and also copper, which they had 
got by trade, but of the magic tin he sought there 
was not a trace. Nor could he make them under¬ 
stand what it was he desired. 

When Tubal and his brother again took up 
the trail, they turned toward the west, for the 
people of the clay country told them that in that 
direction lay the sea. 

For days and weeks they travelled, killing 
birds and small animals for food, meeting now 
and then bands of wandering shepherds, with 
whom they exchanged copper knives and arrow 
heads for meat and drink. This part of their 
journey was the hardest, because of the hot winds 
which came from the desert to the south of them, 
but they kept on and at last came to another 
range of hills, beyond which the country swept 
down in a wide sloping plain to the sea. 

[ 52 ] 




THE MAGIC METAL 


All through this plain they found villages, but 
they were different from the villages of the clay 
country. Here the people lived in houses and 
huts built of stone. They were a brown people, 
like those of the clay country; their hair was 
not shaved, but short and curly, and their cloth¬ 
ing, instead of being made of leather, or wool, 
was of a white cloth, smooth and shining, called 
linen, which neither Tubal nor his brother had 
ever seen before. 

They made the two travellers welcome, how¬ 
ever, especially when, at night, Jubal played for 
them on his reed pipes. They too had pipes, 
and also made music by picking on strings of fine 
gut, stretched across a wooden frame. 

They offered ivory, and linen cloth, and glass 
work, in exchange for the things Tubal had 
brought, but everywhere he asked, by signs, for 
the smiths, and examined their work for some 
trace of the magic metal he sought. But he could 
find none. 

At last they came to a place beside the sea, a # 
small village of stone, built partly on an island, 
with stone walls about its sides and a causeway 

[ 53 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

leading from the island to the shore. Along this 
causeway, and in the water about the island were 
anchored many boats, with oars and sails. It was 
the first time the two brothers had ever seen so 
vast a body of water and they stood for a long 
time in silence gazing at it. The water they 
saw was the Mediterranean Sea, and the village 
on the island was later to become the great city 
of Tyre. Now the town was a very small place, 
but to Tubal and his brother it seemed marvel¬ 
lous indeed, after the villages of tents and mud 
huts to which they were accustomed. 

The people, too, were more civilised than those 
of Tubal’s tribe; their clothing was finer, their 
jars and bowls of pottery were smoother and 
better made, with figures painted on them in 
bright colours, men, and girls dancing, and ani¬ 
mals, which the two brothers greatly admired. 
They made glass, too, which the people of Tu¬ 
bal’s tribe did not know how to make, and worked 
it into beads, of brilliant hues, and bottles, shin¬ 
ing like the tail feathers of a peacock. In this 
place Tubal and Jubal saw many strange and 
wonderful things, but the most wonderful of all, 

[ 54 ] 



THE PEOPLE OF THAT COUNTRY MADE WONDERFUL GLASS 

[ 55 ] 








THE MAGIC METAL 


to them, were the purple-sailed ships. It was 
from a sailor on one of these ships, Tubal remem¬ 
bered, that the traveller had obtained the armlet 
of tin. 

He and Jubal went down to the stone wharves 
where one of these vessels lay. They had found, 
by chance, a man from their own country who 
had wandered away and now lived by the sea, 
and this man they took with them, so that he 
might speak for them, and tell the men on the 
ship what it was they wished. 

The vessel, built of wooden planks, was as long 
as eight tall men, with bow and stern rising high 
out of the water. A row of oars along each side 
was manned by sailors who sat on benches; strong 
brown fellows, bare to the waist, with curly hair 
and rings of gold and silver in their ears. In the 
middle of the boat rose a short, stout mast, across 
which was a spar or yard, carrying the sail. Tu¬ 
bal’s guide told him the ship came from the 
Wonderful Isle across the water to the west, 
trading fine pottery, and glass, and metal work 
in exchange for wool, and copper, and cedar 
wood and other things they did not have on their 

[ 57 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

island. These people, Tubal’s guide said, were 
the greatest metal workers in the world, but they 
had to get the gold and other metals in which 
they worked from other lands, as they did not 
have any in their own. 

This disappointed Tubal very much, for he had 
hoped to find his magic metal on the Wonderful 
Isle. But when he went on board the ship, and 
asked the sailors, through his guide, about it, 
they shook their heads, not knowing what he 
meant. 

After a time the captain of the ship came up, 
a powerful man with bright, smiling eyes. When 
he heard Tubal’s story of the armlet of tin he 
went to his cabin below the decks and brought 
out a large drinking cup, which he placed in 
Tubal’s hands. 

At first Tubal thought it was silver, but when 
he had weighed it in his hand, and scratched it 
with his copper knife, his heart gave a jump, for 
he saw that the cup was made of the metal he 
sought. But the total amount he held in his 
hand was little more than enough to make a 

[ 58 ] 


THE MAGIC METAL 

single sword, even when mixed with eight or ten 
times its weight of copper. He wanted much 
more than this, and told the captain so. 

“Where does this strange metal come from?” 
he asked. 

The captain smiled. 

“Some has been brought to us from the spice 
islands to the south,” he said. “And some comes 
from the grey north, where there is an island, 
smiling and pleasant in the summer time, but 
cold and dark in the winter. Our ships which 
go out through the narrow straits into the great 
ocean sail north, keeping close to the land, and 
at last come to this island, trading with the bar¬ 
barians who dwell there, and bringing back such 
things as they have to barter. Among them are 
many rude ornaments, armlets and the like, made 
of this strange metal, but the smiths of my coun¬ 
try find small use for it, save in making such 
things as this drinking cup you see, and even for 
that they like gold and silver better. From the 
far-off south, too, as I have told you, this metal 
is sometimes brought by black men and brown, 

[ 59 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

along with ivory, and gold, and sweet-smelling 
woods to burn as incense before the gods. What 
need have you of so worthless a thing?” 

Tubal laughed and stretched his brawny shoul¬ 
ders. 

“I too am a worker in metals,” he said, “mak¬ 
ing knives, and spear points and swords of cop¬ 
per, such as you have often seen. But with this 
white metal you set such small store by I can 
forge you a blade that will cut through wood or 
bone as though it were softest flesh, and leave 
the edge as keen as before.” 

The captain marvelled at Tubal’s words. 

“If you can do this,” he said, “the which I 
doubt, then would you be the greatest smith 
among men.” 

“I can do it,” Tubal replied, and his brother 
Jubal nodded his head. 

“Then come w T ith me to my country,” the cap¬ 
tain said, “and if you can do what you claim, my 
people will give you great honour amongst them, 
and set you above all the smiths of the land.” 

So Tubal and Jubal bartered their horses for 

[ 60 ] 



I 



NCIENT EGYPTIAN SHIPS 


[61] 





































THE MAGIC METAL 


copper, wherewith to make swords, and with 
their guide took passage on the purple-sailed ship 
for the Wonderful Isle that lay across the water 
to the west. 

For six days and nights they sailed, and on the 
seventh day they came to the shores of the Won¬ 
derful Isle, which we now call Crete. Thousands 
of years ago there were men living on that island, 
building houses and palaces and temples as old 
as those of ancient Egypt, some people think. 
Later on the men of Crete were to become one 
of the great nations of the earth, but at the time 
Tubal and his brother went there they were just 
beginning to gain the knowledge of pottery and 
glass-making, of metal-working, of carving in 
wood and ivory and stone which was later to 
make them so famous. 

The captain of the ship took Tubal before the 
ruler of the city to which they came, a city built 
of stone, at the edge of the sea, and explained 
that he was a worker in metals from a far coun¬ 
try, and claimed to be able to make sword blades 
so strong and keen that they would cut through 
wood and bone without being blunted. 

[ 63 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


The ruler of the city looked at Tubal for a 
time in silence. Then he called to him his most 
skilful smith. 

“Take this stranger to your forge,” he said, 
“and give him whatever he may need.” 

“I ask but one thing,” Tubal said, speaking 
through the guide he had brought with him, 
“which is that I work alone, lest others find out 
my secret.” 

To this the ruler of the city agreed, and Tubal, 
taking the copper he had brought, and the drink¬ 
ing cup of tin the captain had given him, went 
to work. 

All that day and the next he spent beside his 
forge, scarcely stopping to eat, and on the after¬ 
noon of the second day he came before the king, 
bearing in his hands a sword of bronze, with a 
handle of ivory and gold. 

“It is done,” he said, and laid the weapon at 
the king’s feet. 

The ruler took it up, and saw that the work¬ 
manship was good. Then he felt its shining 
edge, laying it beside his own sword of red 
copper. 


[64] 


THE MAGIC METAL 


“How shall I know which is the better?’’ he 
asked. 

Tubal took the king’s sword and placed it in 
his brother Jubal’s hand. 

“Hold it here, edge up, upon this block of 
wood,” he said, taking the sword of bronze in his 
grasp. 

High above his head Tubal raised the heavy 
blade, then brought it down with all his strength 
upon the upturned edge of copper. With a 
clash the two met, and all those about set up a 
shout at what they saw. For the weapon of 
bronze had cut clean through the blade of cop¬ 
per, shearing it in two, so that the parts of it 
fell to the ground. Then he handed the bronze 
sword, unharmed, to the king. 

The latter took it, and rising, placed his hand 
on Tubal’s shoulder. 

“Above all workers of metal in my kingdom 
shall you be honoured,” he said, “and in return 
I command that you depart not from it, lest your 
secret be given to others.” 

So Tubal and his brother Jubal dwelt on the 
Wonderful Isle and made bronze swords for the 

[ 65 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

men of Crete. Because of the new metal these 
people were not only able to win many victories 
over their enemies, but to work in wood, and 
metals and stone as none had worked before 
them. But after a time the secret spread to other 
countries, and all around the shores of the great 
inland sea men began the use of bronze. 

Centuries later another and even more magical 
metal was discovered by the early peoples, 
stronger and better for all sorts of weapons and 
tools than bronze. This metal was iron, and 
when Man began the use of iron and steel, it soon 
took the place of bronze for most purposes. 

The first iron was probably found in lumps, 
just as gold and silver and copper were found, 
and it was of course very rare, and used mostly 
for ornaments. But after a while the early peo¬ 
ples found out how to get iron and other metals 
from their ores by smelting—that is, by heating 
the ores in a furnace until the pure metal was 
melted and ran out in a liquid stream. And since 
there is plenty of iron ore all over the world it 
was not long before iron began to take the place 
of anything else for making weapons and tools. 

[ 66 ] 



THE MAGIC METAL 


But before the discovery of iron, men used 
bronze, and its brother, brass, made of copper 
and zinc, for thousands of years. It is still used 
for making statues, and ornaments, and many 
other things. 


/ 


[67] 


I 


CHAPTER V 


THE WATER CLOCK 

Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, 
there lived on the banks of the Yangtze River in 
China a wealthy man named Fu-chi. 

This Fu-chi had many servants who cared for 
his house, or looked after his cattle, or worked 
in his fields, and because he believed that time 
was a precious thing, like diamonds, he tried to 
make good use of every minute of it, and insisted 
that his servants should do the same. 

From morning to night he was busy, inspect¬ 
ing his stables and fields, giving directions to 
his overseers, receiving his visitors, going over 
his accounts. And in order to know what time 
it was, he caused a great bronze sun-dial to be 
set up in the garden of his house, beside which 
sat a slave boy. As the sun-dial marked the 
hours from sunrise to sunset, this slave boy, 

[ 68 ] 


THE WATER CLOCK 


whose name was Ling, would strike them on a 
bronze bell beside him with a wooden mallet. 

A sun-dial, as perhaps you may know, is an 
instrument used for telling the time, just as we 
now use clocks. You could make a very simple 
one by setting up a stick in the ground, and 
marking its shadow on a smooth floor of earth 
or clay. 

A day, of course, is the length of time between 
one sunrise and the next, that is, the length of 
time it takes the earth to turn around once on 
its axis, or twenty-four hours. The early peo¬ 
ples divided the hours between sunrise and sun¬ 
set into four watches or quarters, so that the time 
from say six o’clock to nine was called the first 
quarter, from nine to twelve or noon the second 
quarter, from noon to three o’clock the third 
quarter, and from three till sunset the fourth 
quarter. They guessed at the time by looking 
at the sun, to see how high in the heavens it was, 
and at night they did the same thing, measuring 
the quarters or watches by the moving of the 
stars. You will find these quarters or watches 
often spoken of in the Bible. 

[ 69 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

Later on, each quarter was divided into three 
parts, or hours, making twelve hours for the day 
and twelve for the night. 

Now it is not so easy to guess the hour of the 
day by just looking at the sun, so the early men 
found a better way. They saw that a tall tree, 
or a rock, or a stick set up in the ground cast a 
shadow, and they also saw that this shadow is 
shortest at noon, when the sun is overhead. On 
the equator, where the sun is exactly overhead 
at noon, there would be no shadow at all, but in 
countries north and south of the equator there 
would always be some shadow at noon, but it 
would be shorter, then, than at any other time of 
the day, and longest, of course, at morning and 
night. So the early men learned to tell the time 
roughly by marking the shadows cast by trees, 
or rocks, or sticks. 

Now suppose you were to drive a peg in the 
ground near your upright stick to mark the 
length of the noon shadow, and other pegs to 
mark the shadow when the sun was half way up 
to noon, and half way down to sunset, you would 
be able to tell, roughly, the four quarters of the 

[ 70 ] 



EARLY WAYS OF TELLING THE TIME 


The Knotted Rope, the Marked Candle or Lamp, the Sun- 
Dial, the Hour Glass, the Water Bowl. 


[ 71 ] 



















































THE WATER CLOCK 


day. It would not be very exact, because in 
winter the sun rises later and sets earlier than 
it does in summer, but still it would be better than 
no way at all. And of course the distances from 
the noon shadow to the shadows at the two quar¬ 
ter points would be very long. 

But suppose you were to set up your stick in 
the middle of a large round bowl, with the top of 
the stick just level with its sides. When the sun 
was just rising, its rays would be level, and would 
therefore go right across the top of the bowl and 
cast no shadow of the stick at all. But the mo¬ 
ment the sun got a little higher, the shadow of 
the stick would begin to creep down the other 
side of the bowl, getting shorter and shorter till 
noon, and then growing longer and longer again 
until sunset, and you could mark the hours on the 
inside of the bowl and use it to tell time with. 
That would be much easier than bothering with 
shadows half a mile or more long. 

The early peoples soon found out how to make 
sun-dials that would tell them the time. And 
they also found out that on two days in the year, 
in March, and one in September, the days 

[ 73 ] 


one 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


and nights are exactly equal in length. These 
two days are called the equinoxes, because 
equinox means equal night, and so the early men 
marked their rude sun-dials on these days, so as 
to have them correct. All this may sound very 
complicated, but the main point is that these 
early peoples used the shadows cast by the sun 
to tell the time of day. And the instruments they 
used we call sun-dials. 

This did well enough, in the daytime, when the 
sun was shining, but at night, when there was 
no sun, it did not do at all. So some of the early 
people found a way of telling the time at night 
by means of a burning rope, with knots in it. 

They found out, by trying it in the daytime, 
how long a piece of rope would be needed to 
burn, let us say, six hours, that is, from six 
o’clock till midnight. Then they would divide 
this piece of rope into six equal parts, by means 
of knots, or by bits of string or other marks tied 
on it. Then the rope was lit, and as each mark 
was reached, they knew that another hour had 
passed. Later on, when candles came into use, 

[ 74 ] 


THE WATER CLOCK 


the same thing was done with them, marks being 
painted on their sides to show the passing of the 
hours as the candle burned down. Neither of 
these ways was very accurate, because the candles 
or ropes would sometimes burn faster, and some¬ 
times slower. 

Now this Fu-chi of whom we have spoken was 
not only very busy during the day, but in the 
evening, too; he liked to make good use of his 
time. So he had a way of dividing the evening 
up into different periods, for music, for conversa¬ 
tion with friends, for study, for meditation, for 
prayer. But because no one knew just what time 
it was, these periods were always getting mixed. 
Friends would come to talk with him while he 
was in the midst of his studies, or the flute play¬ 
ers would begin to play just when he was ready 
for prayers, so that his arrangements for the 
evenings were always being upset. So one day 
Fu-chi went into .his garden and calling all the 
members of his household about him, spoke to 
them, saying: 

“I, Fu-chi, will give to him who shall find a 

[ 75 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

way to mark the hours of the night, as the sun¬ 
dial marks them by day, honour and riches be¬ 
yond all of my servants.” 

Among those who heard the words of Fu-chi 
was Ling, the mallet boy, who sat beside the sun¬ 
dial in the garden. No one had noticed him, yet 
the promise made by his master sounded as fairly 
in his ears as it did in the ears of the overseers 
and the musicians and the makers of pottery and 
all.the other important persons whom Fu-chi had 
summoned to his meeting. Nor, whispered Ling 
to himself, could words, once spoken, be taken 
back again. He, a slave boy, might have riches 
and honours, if he could find a way to mark the 
hours of the night. 

So Ling, sitting beside the great sun-dial, 
thought and thought all through the hot sunny 
day, but no way to do what Fu-chi desired came 
to him. 

At last a slim slave girl, whose name was Yoto, 
came from the house and going to the pool in the 
garden dipped up some water in a jar she car¬ 
ried on her shoulder. And Ling looked after 
her, for she was fair as an iris flower in his sight, 

[ 76 ] 


THE WATER CLOCK 

and her smile was like the new moon. As she 
passed the sun-dial on her way back to the house, 
the jar of water on her shoulder, Ling was just 
striking the third hour of the afternoon on his 
bell. 

Now this slave girl liked to tease Ling, so she 
glanced toward the house, and seeing that no one 
was looking she set the jar of water down on the 
stone base of the sun-dial and began to poke fun 
at him, asking him what he meant to do with all 
his money, when he found out a way to tell the 
time by night. 

As Ling finished the third stroke upon his bell, 
he happened to notice that Yoto’s water jar was 
cracked, so that a tiny stream came from it, fall¬ 
ing drop by drop upon the flat stones beneath. 
The sight held his attention firmly, so that he 
scarcely heard the slave girl as she gossiped on. 
And because Ling was silent, and made her no 
reply, Yoto became angry, and tried all the 
harder to tease him, so that many minutes passed, 
and the shadow of the sun-dial moved the width 
of Ling’s two fingers. 

At last Yoto grew tired of her game, and 

[ 77 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

stooped to pick up the jar of water, but Ling 
stopped her. 

“Your jar is cracked, Yoto,” he said. “See— 
already it has lost a quarter of its contents. 
Leave it and fetch another, lest your mistress 
punish you for spilling water on her polished 
floors.” 

The girl looked down and saw that Ling spoke 
the truth, so she hurried into the house and, bring¬ 
ing out a second jar, filled it at the pool and went 
her way. But Ling sat staring at the water 
which had dripped from the cracked jar to the 
stones beneath, and a look of wonder shone in his 
eyes. When at last the time came to strike the 
fourth hour on his hell, he took the broken pot 
and poured the little water that still remained in 
it upon the ground. There was a bright smile 
upon his face as he struck the four strokes upon 
his bell, for in that hour Ling had found out a 
way to mark the passing of time by night. 

One evening, a few days later, Ling sounded 
the sunset hour upon his bell, and throwing down 
his mallet went to Fu-chi, who sat in the garden 

[ 78 ] 



THE WATER CLOCK 

enjoying the cooling breezes. Before him Ling 
bent humbly. 

“Honourable Master,” he said, “I, Ling, the 
sun-dial boy, can show you how to mark the 
hours of the night.” 

Fu-chi folded his ivory fan and gazed at Ling 
coldly. 

“You?” he asked, frowning. “How shall an 
ignorant boy do that which the wisest men of my 
household are not able to do?” 

“That I ask permission to show you, August 
One,” Ling said modestly, but there was a smile 
of confidence in his eyes. 

“Very well. And if you fail, fifty lashes and 
a bleeding back for your reward.” Fu-chi flut¬ 
tered his fan sharply, and lay back in his teak- 
wood chair. 

Ling went to a corner of the garden, where he 
slept beneath a roof of matting, and lifting in 
his arms a large earthenware jar carried it to the 
place where Fu-chi sat and placed it on the 
ground before him. In the side of the jar, close 
to the bottom, a tiny hole had been pierced, and 

[ 79 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

in this hole was a wooden plug. When he had 
set the large jar before Fu-chi, Ling brought 
a second and smaller jar, and with it filled the 
larger one to the brim with water. Then he went 
again to his matting hut and brought back a bit 
of soft wood, round and flat like a pancake, from 
the centre of which rose a slender white willow 
wand, about the thickness of his little finger. 
Around this wand were tied at equal distances 
apart six bits of coloured string, the first white, 
the second yellow, the third red, the fourth green, 
the fifth blue and the sixth black. 

Going up to the jar Ling set the flat piece of 
wood afloat on the surface of the water in it, and 
bending down, took the plug from the little hole, 
so that the water in the jar began to trickle out 
very slowly on the ground. 

“Master,” he said, “this is my way to mark the 
hours of the night.” 

But Fu-chi, who saw nothing but a jar of 
water with a willow wand rising from it, became 
angry, and looked at Ling with a frown. 

“What nonsense is this?” he cried. “How shall 
a jar of water mark the time?” 

[ 80 ] 


THE WATER CLOCK 

“In this way. Illustrious One,” said Ling 
quietly. “Through the little hole in the bottom of 
the jar the water, as you see, slowly runs out. 
When the first hour of the night has passed, the 
water in the jar has sunk so much, carrying the 
float, and the willow wand down with it. I 
watched it, this morning, beside my sun-dial, and 
when the first hour had passed, I marked the 
point on the willow wand by tying about it a 
white cord, which was then just level with the top 
of the jar. When the second hour had passed, 
I marked the place on the willow wand with a 
cord of yellow. At the third hour the red cord 
will be just passing out of sight, and so on until 
midnight, when all the cords will be hidden save 
only the black. By that time the jar will be al¬ 
most empty, and must be filled again. Have I 
done well, Illustrious Master?” Again Ling 
bowed his head before Fu-chi. 

The great man sat for a long time gazing at 
the jar before him, watching the willow wand as 
it slowly sunk from sight. Minute after minute 
passed, and Ling wondered at his master’s si¬ 
lence, but still Fu-chi did not speak. Only when 

[ 81 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


the white cord was level with the edges of the jar 
did he stir. 

“It is the hour for music,” he cried, clapping 
his hands. “The second hour of the evening. 
Let the musicians be summoned, and all my 
household brought before me.” 

Every one came running, and Yoto, the slave 
girl with them. Then Fu-chi spoke. 

“Listen, all of you, great and small,” he cried, 
“Ling, my mallet boy, who strikes the hours of 
the day beside the sun-dial, has found a way to 
mark the hours of the night. No longer shall he 
be a slave, but a free man from this day on. Let 
there be music and feasting, that all may do him 
honour.” Then he turned to Ling. “Boy,” he 
said, “if you have any wish, speak, that I may 
grant it.” 

Then Ling went over to Yoto and took her 
by the hand. 

“I wish, Master,” he said, “that Yoto may also 
be free from this night on, and that I may have 
her for my wife.” 

“It is done,” said Fu-chi. “Let the musicians 
play.” 


[ 82 ] 


THE WATER CLOCK 


So Ling, the mallet boy, won the hand of Yoto, 
and made the first water clock. 

It was four thousand years, before men were 
able to improve on Ling’s water clock by mak¬ 
ing a coiled spring, as it unwound, turn the hands 
on the face of a watch or clock, so that each turn 
around the clock face marked the passing of an 
hour. Indeed, there is a water clock something 
like the one Ling made in the city of Canton, 
China, to-day, which has been in use there for 
over three thousand years. 

Anything that moves regularly can be used as 
a measure of time—the turning of the earth, the 
sinking of water as it runs out of a jar, the sand, 
trickling slowly from one end of an hour-glass 
to the other, the uncoiling of a coiled spring, the 
turning of a wheel by means of weights, such as 
are used in grandfather’s clocks. But it took 
man a long time to go from the shadow of a rock 
to the beautifully made watch, with its delicate 
steel wheels, its bearings of jewels that will not 
wear out. These things we owe to thinkers, like 
Ling, who used their brafrns. 


[ 83 ] 



CHAPTER VI 


THE BRIGHT RUG 

Once in the far-off days before the beginning 
of history, there lived in the mountains of Asia 
a wandering tribe of shepherds. 

The chief of this tribe was named Tamar, and 
among his many children was a little girl called 
Nadji. 

Now even though she was the chief’s daughter, 
Nadji, like the other girls of the tribe, had a great 
deal of work to do. And the thing which Nadji 
did best was weaving. 

She had been taught to weave by her mother, 
and in all the tribe there was no one who could 
make such smooth, fine cloth. 

The country in which Nadji’s people lived was 
cold, especially in the winter time, for it was high 
land, a country of great plateaus, cut by wide 
valleys, and surrounded by mountains, some of 
them covered with snow. And because it was 

[ 84 ] 



NADJI’S FATHER WAS CHIEF OF A NOMAD TRIBE 

[ 85 ] 






















I 



THE BRIGHT RUG 


cold, the people had great need for warm coats 
and caps to wear in the daytime, and thick rugs 
to wrap themselves up in when they were asleep 
at night. 

So the men would clip the long silky wool from 
the sheep at shearing time, and bring it to the 
women and girls to wash. And the women would 
carry the wool in great bales, balancing them on 
their heads, down to the banks of the stream, just 
as their mothers and grandmothers had done for 
centuries before them, and wash the wool in the 
clear running water until all the dirt and grease 
had been scrubbed from it, leaving the wool white 
and fresh and clean. Then they would spread it 
out in the sun to dry. 

After that the old women would sit hour after 
hour picking and combing the wool with wooden 
combs, and then twisting the long fibres into 
flossy yarn or thread. They did not use a spin¬ 
ning wheel for this, as our great-grandmothers 
did, but spun the twisted thread on a short stick, 
with a stone or a lump of clay at the end of it, 
to make it turn more easily. Then with these 
twisted threads the younger women and girls 

[ 87 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

would weave thick warm cloth, for clothing, and 
saddle bags, and sleeping rugs. 

The first peoples learned how to weave a very 
long time ago, as we have seen in “The First 
Days of Man,” making use of twisted grasses in 
the beginning, and later on the hair or wool from 
the skins of animals, and the fibres of plants. 
But of all the things they used, wool, from the 
sheep, or hair from the backs of certain kinds of 
goats, made the warmest cloth. So the tribe of 
Tamar used wool, in their weaving. 

This weaving they did on what is called a loom. 
In the early days a loom was made by placing a 
round pole across the crotches of two trees or 
posts. From this round pole were stretched close 
together, side by side, the threads or cords which 
form what is called the warp. These threads 
were fastened at the bottom to another round 
pole, the weight of which kept the threads of the 
warp stretched tight. 

In and out across these up and down threads 
were woven the weft, or woof, just as children 
in kindergarten weave basket-work mats of strips 
of paper or straw. This was the earliest form of 

[ 88 ] 


THE BRIGHT RUG 


weaving machine, or loom. Later on men im¬ 
proved this simple device, by using flat sticks 
across the warp to separate the alternate threads, 
instead of going in and out around each one with 
a needle, and in this way, by pushing half of the 
warp threads forward, and the other half back¬ 
ward, all at the same time, they could shoot the 
thread of the woof right across the loom with one 
throw, using for this a smooth bit of wood called 
a shuttle. The same principle is used in the great 
power looms in our cloth factories to-day. 

It was a simple loom such as the one described 
above that Nadji used in weaving her rugs, and 
the things that she made were very thick and 
warm. 

For the most part they were woven of white 
or undyed wool, for in the early days the people 
thought only of keeping themselves warm, and a 
white rug would do this just as well as a coloured 
one. 

Now Nadji loved the deep blue of the sky, and 
the yellow of the sunlight, and the red leaves of 
the flowers, and all things that had colour and 
beauty. The white wool, which was sometimes 

[ 89 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


a dirty grey because of the fleece from black 
sheep which was mixed with it, and sometimes 
brown because of dust blown by the wind, did 
not please her. 

So as she sat working at her loom, she often 
thought how nice it would be to weave into her 
rugs the blue of the sky, and the red of the flow¬ 
ers, and the yellow of the sunlight. But because 
nobody had ever done such a thing, Nadji kept 
on for a long time weaving only in white. 

Now there was an old woman in the tribe who 
took care of people when they were sick, and she 
knew the secrets of roots and herbs and leaves 
and bark, and boiled these things in water to 
make medicines, tea for those who had fevers, 
salve for wounds, lotions to rub on bruises, and 
many other things of that sort. 

From the leaves of the wild indigo plant she 
was able to make a wonderful blue, and from the 
roots of the madder, a beautiful red, and from the 
wild sumac bushes a deep golden yellow, and 
sometimes she would boil bits of woollen yarn in 
these colours, washing them afterwards in alum 
or soured milk, so that when the yarn was dried 

[ 90 ] 


THE BRIGHT RUG 


in the sun the colours would not wash out again, 
but remained fast in the wool. 

These bright-coloured threads the women 
would tie in their hair, or use to string beads on, 
and the men would make plumes for the bridles 
of their horses, or for their spear shafts. But so 
far no one had thought of using these coloured 
yarns for making rugs, because they looked on 
rugs as useful things, to keep them warm, and 
not as things which could be beautiful as well. 

One day Nadji went down to the place where 
the women were spinning to get some fresh wool 
for a rug she was making, and on her way she 
passed the hut of the old medicine woman, whose 
name was Adah. In front of the hut the old 
woman had hung out some bright-coloured yarns 
to dry, and Nadji stood for a while gazing at 
the wonderful blue, and the beautiful red, and the 
golden yellow, all glowing brightly in the sun¬ 
shine. As she stood there, the thought came to 
her, why should she not weave those beautiful 
colours into a rug? 

So, without saying what she meant to do, 
Nadji, who was the chief’s daughter, spoke to the 

[ 91 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


old woman, telling her that she wanted a ball of 
the blue yarn, and of the yellow, and of the red. 

“My father will give you new wool, of twice 
the weight, for that which I have taken,’’ she said, 
and with the bright-coloured yarn in her arms 
she went back to her loom. 

The warp for her new rug was already in 
place, and she had woven in white a space as wide 
as her two hands at one end of the rug. Now she 
began to think how she might make a pleasing 
pattern with the colours she had brought. 

First she wove back and forth many strands of 
red, making a space across the rug as wide as 
her palm. Then she took up the yellow ball and 
wove with that, and soon there showed a wide 
band of gold, beneath her flying fingers. 

Next came the blue, deep as the skies, and 
what Nadji had done pleased her greatly, for she 
saw in her work the bright colours of the rain¬ 
bows which sometimes hung over the mountain 
tops after a storm. And as she wove she thought 
of Jal, the son of Kish, a young man of the tribe 
who sometimes smiled at her, and her song was 
a song of love. 


[92] 


THE BRIGHT RUG 


Again she took up the yellow ball, and shot the 
golden thread back and forth until it was all used 
up, so that the centre of her rug was gold. 

Twice, before her work was done, she went 
back to Adah for more yarn, but when the old 
woman asked her what she was doing with it 
Nadji laughed, and would not tell her. 

At last, when all was finished, Nadji took the 
rug from her loom, and throwing it about her 
shoulders, went toward the tents. She was very 
proud of what she had made and wanted every 
one to see it. 

As she came near the camp fires, all the men 
and women looked at her in surprise, and some 
of them laughed, while others gathered about ad* 
miring the beautiful thing she had woven. In the 
fire-light the colours of the rug gleamed like gold, 
and sapphires and rubies. But Nadji was think¬ 
ing of Jal. 

Presently she saw him, sitting before his tent, 
and going up to him, Nadji laid the rug at his 
feet. 

“For you, Jal, son of Kish,” she said, casting 
down her eyes. 


[93] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


When Jal saw the beauty of the rug he mar¬ 
velled at it, and took it in his hands, admiring 
its bright colours. Then Tamar, Nadji’s father, 
hearing the noise, came out of his tent and seeing 
the rug in Jal’s hands took it from him. It 
pleased him so that he desired it for himself, and 
not knowing where Jal had gotten it, offered to 
buy it from him, saying that he would give in 
return anything that Jal might ask. 

Then Jal looked at Nadji and to him she 
seemed even more beautiful than the bright-col¬ 
oured rug, so he spoke to Tamar, saying: 

“For my rug of many colours, O Tamar, there 
is but one price, and that is the hand of the weaver 
who made it.” And Nadji blushed as red as the 
red in her rug, and her eyes w T ere as blue as its 
blue, and her hair as golden. 

“She is yours,” Tamar said. “Who is the 
weaver?” 

“She stands before you,” said Jal, and took 
Nadji’s hand in his. 

Then Tamar gave a great laugh and threw the 
rug about his shoulders. 

“The word of Tamar is given,” he said. “Take 

[ 94 ] 


THE BRIGHT RUG 


her, and care for her well.” So did Nadji weave 
the bright rug, and win the man she loved. 

But the rug that Nadji made was only a be¬ 
ginning. Before long other weavers found out 
how to make new and more beautiful designs and 
patterns. Instead of weaving plain bands of 
colour across their rugs they learned, by chang¬ 
ing the colours often, and later on by tying into 
the warp bright bits of yarn with the loose ends 
of the knot sticking up, to make the wonderful 
patterns we see in oriental rugs to-day. All the 
quaint little figures and designs in these rugs 
have a meaning. For instance, in some rugs you 
may see the form of a bee, or a palm tree, which 
mean immortality, or of a lotus flower, which 
stands for the sun, or of a lion, or hawk, which 
represent power, or a zig-zag, which means wa¬ 
ter, a pine cone, which means fire, or a wheel, 
which is the symbol of God. 

The study of these rugs is a very interesting 
one, and some of the most wonderful of them are 
centuries old, and took many years to make. 
They are also very valuable, even small ones often 
being worth thousands of dollars. 

[ 95 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

Rug-making is older than the earliest civilisa¬ 
tion we know, older even than Egypt, or Baby¬ 
lon. Rugs are made in all eastern countries, in 
Persia, in India, in China. The Chinese rugs are 
noted for their soft golden tones, and their won¬ 
derful blues. The most valuable rugs of all are 
made of silk. In countries such as Turkey, where 
the Prophet Mohammed is worshipped, men 
kneel at the hour of prayer upon their prayer 
rugs, wherever they may be, even in the streets, 
and you can always tell a prayer rug because it 
will have at one end of it an arch, which repre¬ 
sents a Mohammedan mosque, or church. 

All these oriental rugs are made by hand, the 
patterns being handed down from father to son 
for hundreds and even thousands of years. Be¬ 
cause they are made by hand, and because the 
wool used is longer and finer and more silky, and 
because the vegetable dyes are better and more 
durable and lasting than those our chemists make 
from coal tar, these oriental rugs can never be 
equalled by modern machinery. They are beau¬ 
tiful works of art, to be prized and taken care of 
like fine tapestries, and paintings, and books. 

[ 96 ] 


CHAPTER VII 


SILVER MOON’S SILK DRESS 

Little Silver Moon sat in the palace garden, 
weeping. 

She had played with all her toys, that morn¬ 
ing, and was tired of them, and because she had 
broken her mother’s best mother-of-pearl fan, 
she had been severely scolded, and sent out into 
the garden to play. Little Silver Moon had to 
do as she was told, of course, for her mother was 
Si-Ling-Chi, Empress of China, and wife of the 
Emperor Huang-ti. 

All this happened a very long time ago, nearly 
three thousand years before Christ, but even in 
those far-off days little girls were supposed to 
obey their mothers and not break their fans. 

Silver Moon sat on a stone bench beneath a 
clump of mulberry trees. She sat there a long 
time, and because she had nothing else to do she 
allowed her eves to wander over the broad leaves 

[ 9 ?] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


of one of the mulberry trees, watching the fat, 
hairy, cream-coloured worms, with eight legs 
along each side of them, which were greedily feed¬ 
ing on the leaves. But Silver Moon was not 
fond of worms, especially such ugly, fat ones, and 
so she did not pay much attention to them. 

As she looked at the branches of the tree, how¬ 
ever, she saw something that interested her more. 
One of the fat, hairy worms had attached itself 
to a slender twig and was spinning a thin web like 
the web of a spider, forcing out of its body a tiny 
stream of liquid, finer than a hair, which hard¬ 
ened as soon as the air struck it into a delicate, 
gossamer thread. 

But what interested Silver Moon most was not 
this thread so much as the fact that the little 
worm, instead of spinning its web between the 
twigs and branches, as a spider would have done, 
was winding itself up in it, round and round, like 
a spool of cotton. Silver Moon thought this was 
very queer indeed. 

Presently, on looking closer, she saw many 
more of these funny little spools, round and soft 
looking, and somewhat the shape and colour of a 

[ 98 ] 


SILVER MOON’S SILK DRESS 


fuzzy fat peanut. She thought it a strange thing, 
that these worms should wind themselves up in 
such a tight wrapping, and wondered if after 
they had done it, they died. 

But soon she saw something else happening to 
one of the fat spools, or cocoons, as they are 
called. It was slowly bursting open at one end. 
Soon there crawled out of it a large, cream- 
coloured moth, like a butterfly, which sat on a 
leaf and spread its silvery wings in the sun to dry. 
So Silver Moon knew that the ugly worm, in the 
strange house it had made for itself, did not die, 
but changed instead from a worm to a butterfly. 

Very carefully she reached up and plucked the 
cocoon from the twig to which it was attached. 
At first she tossed it up and down like a ball, but 
soon she grew tired of this, and began to pick it to 
pieces by unwinding the filmy thread which the 
worm had so carefully wound itself up in. 

Yard after yard she unwound, reeling it off 
very gently so as not to break it. Once in a while, 
however, she found that the thread had already 
been broken, because of the hole which the but¬ 
terfly had made through the end of the cocoon, 

[ 99 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


when bursting its way out. Then she would have 
to find a loose end, before she could go on un¬ 
winding. Soon there was a soft, fluffy mass of 
the delicate thread in her lap, and while Silver 
Moon of course did not know it, the thread she 
had been unwinding was what we now call silk. 

Now the Empress Si-Ling-Chi was sorry that 
she had punished her little daughter on account 
of the fan, so when the cool of the evening came 
she went down into the garden with her maids- 
in-waiting to see what Silver Moon was doing. 

They found her sitting on the stone bench be¬ 
neath the mulberry trees, industriously unwind¬ 
ing the silk worm’s cocoon. When her mother, 
with a smile, asked her what she was about, Silver 
Moon held out the tiny handful of silk, and ex¬ 
plained how she had come to find it. 

The Empress Si-Ling-Chi, who was a very 
clever woman even if she did live nearly five 
thousand years ago, admired the delicate, silvery 
thread very much, and was surprised to find how 
strong it was. 

Then Silver Moon, who was very fond of fairy 
stories, clapped her hands. 

[ 100 ] 


SILVER MOON’S SILK DRESS 

“It must be what the fairies make their dresses 
of,” she said. 

The Empress smiled and said perhaps it was, 
although as a matter of fact she did not believe 
in fairies at all. 

“Let us go into the house, child,” she said. 
“Your father will be waiting.” 

But Silver Moon still sat upon the bench, the 
bit of silk tightly clutched in her hand. 

“I wish I could have a dress of it,” she said. 

Now Si-Ling-Chi was very fond of her daugh¬ 
ter, and loved to indulge her whims. But this 
whim was too foolish to be taken seriously. 

“If we had a thousand times as much,” she 
said, looking at the tiny mass of silk in Silver 
Moon’s hand, “it would not be enough to make 
you a dress, even if we could weave it. What 
you ask is impossible.” 

“I thought the Empress of China could do 
anything,” Silver Moon pouted. “And besides, 
there are plenty more of those queer things in 
the trees. Look!” She pulled aside the 
branches. “There are hundreds of them up 
there. Don’t you see?” 

[ 101 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

The Empress, looking up, saw many more of 
the little cocoons fastened here and there to the 
mulberry branches. So she told Silver Moon 
that she would see what she could do. 

The next day she sent servants with baskets 
to pick the fuzzy little cocoons from all the mul¬ 
berry trees in the palace garden, and from all the 
other gardens round about. She ordered them 
to bring back as many as they could, so that by 
nightfall they placed before her a hundred 
baskets. 

Then the Empress sent for Sun Yat, her head 
weaver, and showing him the cocoons, told him 
what she wanted. 

“Unwind the thread from them,” she said, 
“and spin it, and weave it into cloth with which 
to make a dress for Silver Moon’s birthday.” 

Sun Yat picked up one of the cocoons and 
holding it in his hand tried to unwind the delicate 
thread, but it broke in his fingers. 

“It is fine as a cobweb, August and All-Power¬ 
ful One,” he said. “Where shall I find spinners 
to spin it, or a loom on which to weave it?” 

“Begone, son of a pig!” said Si-Ling-Chi an- 

[ 102 ] 


SILVER MOON’S SILK DRESS 

grily. “Those are questions to ask yourself, not 
” 

me. 

So Sun Yat went away, shaking his head, but 
because the word of the Empress was law, 
there was nothing for him to do but obey. So 
he had the hundred baskets full of cocoons car¬ 
ried to his shop. 

Sun Yat was very much worried. All the 
weaving he had done up to now had been with 
heavy, coarse threads of wool, or cotton, that 
white, fluffy mass of fibres, thin yet strong, which 
grows in pods or bolls upon the cotton plant. 
But he had never tried to spin or weave threads 
of such delicate stuff as silk. 

For a week he laboured in his shop, soaking 
the cocoons in warm water to soften them, show- 
ing his assistants how to unwind the fragile 
thread from the cocoons without breaking it, 
winding it on ivory spools or bobbins. A score 
of nimble-fingered young girls worked day 
and night, and at last all the cocoons were un¬ 
wound. 

Then Sun Yat called to him his chief spinner 
and told him what he wanted. 

[ 103 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


“Take these bobbins of cobweb,” he said, “and 
spin me a good strong thread.” 

The chief spinner unwound some of the silk, 
and it broke in his hand. 

“How can a man spin a thread of cobweb, Hon¬ 
ourable Master?” he asked. 

“Begone, son of a lame duck,” roared Sun Yat, 
remembering what the Empress had said to him. 
“Those are questions to ask yourself, not me.” 
And because the word of his master Sun Yat was 
law, the head spinner said no more, although he 
shook his head. 

Now the head spinner had a daughter named 
Lotus Bud, whose fingers were as delicate as 
the petals of a rose, and when she saw how 
troubled her father was, she asked him what was 
the matter. 

“Can you spin a thread of cobwebs?” her fa¬ 
ther asked. 

“I can try,” said Lotus Bud, taking one of the 
bobbins. 

All that day she worked and worked, spinning 
the fragile silk into a strong thread, and when 
night came she took the bobbin to her father and 

[ 104 ] 



LOTUS BUD WORKED ALL DAY, SPINNING THE FRAGILE SILK 

[ 105 ] 












































































































SILVER MOON’S SILK DRESS 

showed it to him. The head spinner was de¬ 
lighted. 

Show the clumsy-fingered girls in my shop 
how to do it,” he said, “for there are a hundred 
bobbins to be spun.” 

So Lotus Rud showed the other girls how to 
spin the silk without breaking it, and when the 
end of the week had come he carried the yarns of 
silk back to Sun Yat. 

The head weaver was very much pleased, so 
he called to him his best dyers and told them to 
dye the silk a silvery blue. Then he went to 
work to make a loom. 

He made it of polished ebony wood, very dif¬ 
ferent from the heavy looms he used when weav¬ 
ing wool. And his shuttle was of ivory, smooth 
as the skin of a child. For he desired above all 
things to carry out the commands of the Em¬ 
press Si-Ling-Chi, whose word was law. 

So when the thread the head spinner had 
brought had been washed, and dyed a silvery 
blue, and dried in the sun and the wind, Sun Yat 
sat down at his ebony loom and began to weave. 

For years and years he had been the head 

[ 107 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


weaver of the palace, and his fingers were as deft 
as a young girl’s. Beneath his hands the ivory 
shuttle, carrying the delicate thread, shot back 
and forth across the warp, flashing in the sun¬ 
shine, and slowly there grew upon the roller of 
the loom a gossamer fabric, delicate as moon¬ 
beams upon the still waters of a pond, and soft 
to the touch as the south wind. No man had 
ever before seen so shining and beautiful a fabric, 
and Sun Yat marvelled at its loveliness. 

When the roll of silk was done, Sun Yat car¬ 
ried it to the palace and, kneeling before the Em¬ 
press, spread it out for her to look at. And the 
Empress, too, was in raptures over its beauty. 

“You have done well, Sun Yat,” she said, “and 
I shall reward you and your spinners and your 
dyers, and the girl called Lotus Bud, with many 
pieces of gold.” For Sun Yat had told her about 
the head spinner’s daughter. Then Si-Ling-Chi 
sent for the Emperor, Huang-ti, and explained 
what she had done. 

As soon as Huang-ti saw the roll of silk, he, 
too, was delighted with it. Being a great and 
wise emperor, he understood the value of the new 

[ 108 ] 


SILVER MOON S SILK DRESS 

discovery, and gave orders that henceforth the 
silk-worms all over his kingdom should be cared 
for, and their cocoons gathered in season for the 
making of silk. As for Silver Moon, she went 
to her birthday party wearing the first silk dress 
that had ever been made in the world, and look¬ 
ing like a fairy princess. 

The new material soon became very popular. 
Everybody wanted to wear clothes made out of 
the soft, shining fabric, and the subjects of Si- 
Ling-Chi were so grateful to her for what she 
had done that they called her the Goddess of the 
Silk-worms, and in China even to this day, when 
the season for the hatching of the silk-worm eggs 
comes around, they hold a great feast in her 
honour. 

Before long, instead of letting the silk-worms 
live and spin their cocoons in trees, the Chinese 
began to raise them in buildings put up for that 
purpose, gathering the mulberry leaves for the 
little worms to feed on. And when they saw that 
the moth, in forcing his way out of the cocoon, 
broke the long thread he had wound about him¬ 
self, in many places, they found out how to stop 

[ 109 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


this by putting the cocoons, just before the moths 
were ready to leave them, in a bath of steam. 
This killed the poor moths, of course, but with¬ 
out it the silken thread when unwound from the 
cocoon, instead of being in a single piece, some¬ 
times over half a mile long, would be broken into 
many shorter pieces by the bursting open of the 
cocoon by the moth. 

For a long time the Chinese kept the secret of 
making silk, by declaring it a crime for any one 
to send or take the eggs of the worm out of the 
country, but after a while the secret spread, just 
as Tubal’s secret of making bronze spread, to 
other peoples, and now the silk-worm is raised in 
many warm countries besides China, such as 
Japan, Italy, Spain, Asia Minor and Greece. 
But in England and the United States the worm 
has never been successfully raised. 

They tell an interesting story of how the silk¬ 
worm eggs were finally brought out of China to 
Constantinople. This city, which is in Asia 
Minor, was built, as no doubt you know, by the 
Emperor Constantine, and was the capital of 
the Eastern Roman Empire. It is said that the 

[ 110 ] 


SILVER MOON’S SILK DRESS 


Roman emperor Justinian, finding that, on ac¬ 
count of his war with Persia, the exports of silk 
from China through that country were cut off, 
sent two monks as pilgrims to China, to learn 
the secret of making silk. These two monks not 
only found out how to raise and care for the 
worms, but also brought back a quantity of the 
tiny eggs, hidden in their hollow pilgrim’s staffs. 

Whether this story is true or not, we know that 
not many hundreds of years after the birth of 
Christ the use of silk had spread all over the 
known world. 

So when you put on a silk dress, or a pair of 
silk stockings to-day, you have to thank the keen 
eyes of little Silver Moon, and the keen brain 
of the Empress Si-Ling-Chi, and the skill of 
Sun Yat, the weaver, and the little hands of 
Lotus Bud, the daughter of his chief spinner. 


[Ill] 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE OX-CART 

When the first people began to travel about 
from place to place, they of course walked. 
There was no other way for them to go, unless 
they came to water, in which case they might 
journey down great rivers on rafts, making use 
of the current to sweep them along, or cross lakes 
in canoes, driven by paddles, or voyage on larger 
bodies of water in boats, driven by oars, or even 
sails. But for a long time the only way people 
could get about on land was to walk. 

Now this was all very well, so long as they 
had little or nothing but their weapons, their 
spears and bows and arrows to carry with them, 
but when the tribes began to settle down and 
collect property, that is, such things as pottery, 
and rugs, and rude bits of furniture for their 
houses, it was not so easy to carry these things 
on their backs, along with food to eat by the way, 

[ 112 ] 



THE FIRST SAWMILL 

Saws used by the early workers in wood. 

[ 113 ] 
















THE OX-CART 


especially if they took the old men and women, 
and the young children with them. 

When whole tribes moved, seeking new homes, 
there were a great many things to take along— 
the animals, such as sheep, and goats and cattle 
could, of course, be driven on their own legs, but 
the old folks and the children were not strong 
enough to walk, especially over rough country, 
through thick forests and rocky mountain passes 
and sandy deserts, where there were no roads 
whatever, and the going was hard. So as the 
races of men began to spread further and further 
out over the face of the earth, it became more 
and more necessary for them to find some way to 
carry their things, as well as the people who were 
not able to walk. 

In these days of railroad trains, and auto¬ 
mobiles, and trucks, getting about seems a very 
simple matter, but in those far-off times it was 
anything else. The only things the people had 
to help them were the animals they had trained 
and raised, such as horses or oxen. 

Now owing to the fact that different tribes 
lived in different ways, they slowly began to 

[ 115 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

raise different sorts of domestic animals, and be¬ 
cause of this, two ways of moving from place to 
place came into use. 

One sort of people, as we have seen, were the 
wandering shepherds and nomads. These peo¬ 
ple were dwellers in tents, like the tribe of Nadji 
the rug weaver, and their property at first con¬ 
sisted mainly of goats and sheep, which did not 
have to be carried, because it could carry itself. 

But in order to find good grazing ground for 
their flocks all the year round, these nomads were 
constantly moving about. Some of them, who 
lived on the great plains in what is now South 
Russia, soon found that they could find better 
pasture for their flocks in winter by wandering 
far to the south, just as birds to-day move south 
when the cold weather comes, to find better feed¬ 
ing grounds. And when the summer came, 
these dwellers in tents would drive their flocks 
north again, to feed on the fresh spring grass. 

They did not have much to carry with them, 
beside their weapons, their rugs and tents, but 
even these made a heavy load to carry very far, 
so these nomad people learned how to tame and 

[ 116 ] 


THE OX-CART 


make use of horses. Moving about as they did, 
they built no cities. Having their flocks with 
them, they did not have to worry about food. All 
they had to do was to kill a goat, or a sheep, and 
cook and eat it. They ate wild fruits, but raised 
no grain. When they had need of it, they bar¬ 
tered with other tribes. 

Mounted on their strong, shaggy ponies they 
could travel long distances, even thousands of 
miles, north and south, driving their flocks ahead 
of them, never staying very long in any one place, 
and soon became wonderful horsemen, just as 
their descendants on the great Russian plains are 
to-day. Even the little children could ride like 
the wind, and as these wanderers were quite as 
much at home on horseback as on foot, they had 
no need for wagons or vehicles of any sort with 
wheels, and did not give such things a thought. 

But while these tribes of horsemen were de¬ 
veloping in one direction, men of a different sort, 
living in a different way, were developing in 
quite another. Their homes were in the forest 
and lake and mountain country of Europe. 

Here there were no wide grazing plains such 

[ 117 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

as the nomads had found, and so the life of the 
people in these places was entirely different. 

They first lived in caves, and after that, in 
little villages of huts built of logs, with clay plas¬ 
tered between the logs to fill up the cracks and 
keep out the cold wind. The great fireplaces in 
these huts were made of stone, and the roofs of 
thatch, or sods, held in place by flat stones. 

Some of these villages were built out over the 
water, on stakes or piles driven into the mud, 
like stilts, and remains of them have been found 
at the bottom of lakes in Switzerland. The peo¬ 
ple in these houses were safe from attack, for 
they could be reached only over narrow wooden 
bridges leading from the shore, and in time of 
danger it was an easy matter to tear these bridges 
down. 

Most of the people, however, lived in and 
about the great forests. And just as it was nat¬ 
ural for people who wandered about like the 
nomads to raise horses, so these forest people, 
who moved about very little, came to raise cows, 
and pigs, and oxen, slow-moving beasts on which 
it was not» easy for any one to ride. 

[ 118 ] 



A LAKE-DWELLER’S HOME 


[ 119 ] 











































<1 


THE OX-CART 


Instead of depending on flocks of sheep and 
goats for food, they hunted and killed deer, and 
bears, and wild pigs, and fowl. They also killed 
and ate the animals they raised, pigs, goats, oxen, 
and used the milk of the cows and the cheese they 
made from it for food. They had gardens, too, 
in which they grew a little grain and certain 
vegetables, the roots of which were good to eat. 
And of course, living in this way, not wandering 
about much, these tribes began to collect all sorts 
of things, tools and implements for their houses 
and their farms. 

When a tribe of this sort decided to move, as 
such tribes often did, either because there were 
too many people in one place, or because they 
wanted to find homes in warmer and more pleas¬ 
ant countries, the problem became a serious one 
indeed. Some way of carrying their household 
goods, their old folks, their children, along with 
them had to be found, and so the result was the 
invention of the wheel. 

Who first discovered and made use of the 
wagon wheel we of course do not know, but the 
man who did gave to the world one of its most 

[ 121 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


useful and valuable inventions. Some early 
thinker, working alone in the forest, may have 
seen that the round section of log he had just 
sawed from the trunk of a tree could be rolled 
along over the ground without much effort, while 
to push it or pull it endways took the strength of 
several men, and this may have given him the 
idea of the wheel. Possibly, in bringing such a 
log into the village an ox, or a pair of oxen might 
have been used, and since the log had to be left 
free to turn, and not drag, round pegs would 
have to be driven into the ends of it, or left there 
when it was cut, to which loops of rope for 
traces, or wooden shafts with a fork at the end 
of them, could be attached. A short round log 
of this sort, pulled along by an ox by means of 
traces or shafts was probably the first wheeled 
vehicle ever made. The next step, of course, 
would be to cut away the log between its two 
ends, leaving a rough, heavy axle in the middle, 
with a solid round wheel at each end. But this 
would have the great fault that the axle would 
turn around along with the wheels, making it a 
hard matter to build a wagon body on it. So nat- 

[ 122 ] 


THE OX-CART 


urally the next thing some early thinker did was 
to saw from the end of a log two round, solid 
discs or wheels, bore or burn a hole through the 
middle of each of them, and then stick the two 
ends of the axle through these holes, with a pin 
through each end to keep the wheels from com¬ 
ing off. Now the wheels could turn while the 
axle did not, and so it was an easy matter to 
build on this axle a square body out of boards 
and thus make a wagon or cart in which things 
and people could be carried. It must have been 
a hard task to cut such wheels from a log with 
flint tools, axes, and saws, but somehow these 
early people did it, and built the first wheeled 
wagon or cart. Later on, wheels were made of 
heavy solid rims, with spokes in them, as they 
are made to-day, and chariots with wheels of this 
sort have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, 
thousands of years old. 

It must have taken a long time to build one of 
these ox-carts, in those days, but luckily the peo¬ 
ple were not in a hurry, as we are to-day, and a 
week or two one way or the other made little or 
no difference to them. When they came to move, 

[ 123 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


they hitched their oxen to these carts, piled their 
baskets and jars, their tools and implements, 
their food and women and children into them, 
and set out to find a new home. It must have 
been very rough riding, with no springs to their 
wagons, and no roads, so that we can imagine the 
old people and the children were pretty well 
shaken up. 

It was in ox-carts like this that the light-haired, 
ruddy-cheeked people we now know as the an¬ 
cient Greeks travelled hundreds and hundreds of 
miles from their forest homes in central Europe 
southward to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. 
And here, more than a thousand years before the 
time of Christ they found the dark-haired, brown¬ 
skinned people of the purple-sailed ships, who 
lived on the Wonderful Isle and around the shores 
of the inland sea, and fought with them. And 
because these men from the north were fierce and 
rough and powerful they drove the dark-skinned 
people from their homes in Greece and took the 
land for themselves. They were the forefathers 
of the Greeks we read of in history, and they 
started a new and wonderful civilisation in their 

[ 124 ] 


THE OX-CART 

new home, learning about bronze and many other 
things from the people they had conquered. 

It may have been to some thinker in the north¬ 
ern forests that we owe the invention of the wagon 
wheel. To-day there is scarcely a vehicle, or a 
ship, or a piece of machinery of any kind in the 
world in which wheels of some sort are not used. 

But while the forest peoples were making use 
of the wheel for wagons, people in other parts of 
the world, as we shall see, were using wheels for 
very different purposes. 


[125] 


CHAPTER IX 


THE VALLEY OF CLAY 

The tribe of Erech lived in the land of the clay 
huts, through which Tubal and his brother had 
passed on their way from the mountains to the 

sea. 

They had wandered into this country from 
other lands, probably from the east and north, 
although of this we cannot be sure, and settled in 
the valley of the two great rivers, the Tigris and 
the Euphrates, which we now call Mesopotamia, 
from a Greek word meaning amid or between 
the rivers. But at the point where they made 
their home the two rivers, flowing together, had 
become one, emptying into the Persian Gulf, far 
to the north of where the head of that gulf is 
to-day. 

The people of Tubal, as we have seen, being 
a shepherd tribe, lived in tents. And the people 
of the forests, who did not move about so much, 

[ 126 ] 


THE VALLEY OF CLAY 

lived in huts built of wood, because there was 
plenty of wood all about them, easy to get. And 
the people of the Wonderful Isle built their 
homes of stone, because they had more of that 
than anything else. 

But in the land to which Erech and his people 
had come neither wood nor stone were so plen¬ 
tiful. It was not a country of great forests, but 
one of marshes, and reeds, and clay. So it was 
natural for them to build their houses of clay, 
at first mere huts of reeds with the clay plas¬ 
tered over them, and, later, houses of sun-dried 
bricks. 

This country of the people of Erech was one 
of the very first in which men began to gather 
and live together in villages and towns, and they 
came there and began their civilisation even be¬ 
fore the days of the Wonderful Isle of which we 
have read. They lived in villages and towns be¬ 
cause of the nature of the country to which they 
had come. 

This country was not so well suited for graz¬ 
ing, for feeding flocks and herds, as were the 
grassy plains of the nomads. And wild animals, 

[ 127 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


for food, were not plentiful, as they were in the 
great forests of Europe. But one thing this 
land was particularly good for, and that was 
farming. So, in order to get food for themselves, 
the people of Erech became farmers. 

As we have said, they found before long that 
they could shape the smooth fine clay in the val¬ 
ley into bricks, to build their houses with. But 
thev did not burn these bricks in the fire, as we 
do to-day, but merely dried them in the sun. 
There is very little rain in that country, and for 
that reason sun-dried bricks were almost as good 
as burnt ones. 

Now I am afraid that you may ask how a coun¬ 
try in which there is so little rain could possibly 
be a good place in which to grow things, and that 
would be a very reasonable objection, but al¬ 
though there was not much water in that coun¬ 
try in the shape of rain, there was plenty of it in 
the two great rivers, and Erech and his people 
soon found out how to make use of it. 

At first, when the tribe was small, the people 
built their homes along the river banks, and 
while some of them fished to get food, others with 

[ 128 ] 


THE VALLEY OF CLAY 


sharp sticks and hoes dug up the ground and 
planted seeds, so as to grow grain, from which to 
make bread, and fruits, and vegetables. The 
marshy ground along the banks of the rivers was 
wet whether it rained or not, and so their gar¬ 
dens grew. Far off in the mountains to the north, 
melting snow kept the rivers full of water. 

After a long time, however, as the number of 
people to be fed grew larger and larger, there 
was not room for all their gardens on the banks 
of the river, and they spread further and further 
inland. Now, when it did not rain, and the peo¬ 
ple saw that their gardens were in danger of dry¬ 
ing up, they were forced to go in long lines down 
to the river carrying pottery jars on their shoul¬ 
ders or heads, and bring back in these jars water 
to pour on their gardens. 

The further they got from the river the harder 
it became to carry enough water to keep their 
gardens growing. And without plenty of water, 
things will not grow. So here was a problem for 
a thinker, and it was Sumer, one of the descend¬ 
ants of Erech, who solved it. He solved it for 
all time, by means of a simple invention which 

[ 129 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


was at the same time a very great one. It is used 
all over the world to-day wherever men are 
forced to grow things in countries without rain, 
and this way of doing it which Sumer discovered 
we now call irrigation. 

If we think of the farm on which Sumer and 
his family lived as being a long distance away 
from the river, we can easily see that it would be 
a very hard matter to carry enough water in jars 
to keep his gardens fresh and green. Often when 
Sumer was toiling along through the burning sun 
he would become angry because his farm was not 
nearer the river, so that he would not have to 
carry his water so far. 

One day when the melting snows in the moun¬ 
tains had filled the river to overflowing, Sumer 
saw a tiny rivulet trickle over the banks of the 
surging stream and run down into the garden 
of one of his neighbours, whose place was close to 
the water. And this gave Sumer an idea. If 
the water from the river would run into his neigh¬ 
bour’s garden, why could it not be made to flow 
into his own? 

The next day he went to work with his stone 

[ 130 ] 


THE VALLEY OF CLAY 


hoe, digging a ditch from the river back to his 
garden. It was quite a long distance, and it took 
him many days before the ditch was done, but he 
kept on in spite of the laughter of his friends, who 
thought he was crazy, to try to make the river 
run anywhere but where it had always run in the 
past. As you grow older you will see that people 
are usually like that, ready to laugh at and make 
fun of the man with a new idea, just as they 
laughed at the man who invented the telephone, 
and the steamship, and the airplane. 

Sumer dug his little ditch from the river to his 
garden, and when all was ready he tore down the 
last few bits of earth and watched the water flow 
in a steady stream toward his farm. Here he 
had dug smaller ditches, so as to carry the water 
to the growing plants, and when his neighbours 
saw what he had done, they stopped laughing and 
began to dig ditches too. Before long the gardens 
of the men of Sumer and Erech were bearing the 
richest crops in the world, because of irrigation. 

Even when the dry season came, and the water 
in the rivers fell so low that it would not over¬ 
flow, it was easier to dip water from the river 

[ 131 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


and pour it into the ditches than it had been to 
carry it on their shoulders. So all along the river 
banks people toiled, lifting up the water from the 
bed of the stream to the banks, first by means of 
jars held in their hands, and later, with buckets 
swung from one end of a sweep or pole. These 
poles were held in place across the top of an 
upright post, just as well sweeps are made to-day, 
and the opposite end from the bucket was 
weighted with a heavy stone. The man who 

** i 

worked the sweep filled the bucket with water 
and then raised it by bearing down on the 
weighted end, at the same time swinging the pole 
around so as to bring the bucket up to the bank. 
Here another man would empty it into the ditch, 
or, if the bank was too high, into a little pool, 
from which it was again dipped up, with another 
sweep, to the top of the bank. This method of 
raising water is very old, and yet it is still in use 
in another great country to the west of the land 
of Sumer, Egypt, where there is also little rain, 
but a great river, the Nile, fed by melting snows 
in the mountains. 

After a great many years the whole country 

[ 132 ] 



FARMING IN THE CLAY COUNTRY 

[ 133 ] 





THE VALLEY OF CLAY 

between the rivers was covered with irrigation 
ditches, not little streams, such as the one Sumer 
had built, but deep and wide canals, their sides 
lined with stone. The fields and gardens pro¬ 
duced such wonderful crops that the people of 
the clay country grew rich and powerful, building 
towns that later on became great cities, such as 
Nippur, and Babylon, made of clay bricks, and 
they finally invented a written language, which 
we are able to read to-day because instead of 
writing on things that would not last, such as 
wood, or the skins of animals, or papyrus, a sort 
of paper made out of the bark of reeds, they wrote 
their books, their records, and even their letters on 
tablets of clay, which they afterwards burned in 
the fire, as they burned their pottery bowls and 
jars, so that these tablets, with their messages 
written on them, are as clear and easily read 
to-day as they were when they were written, 
thousands of years ago. 

This civilisation in the clay country between 
the rivers was one of the first we know anything 
about, and we owe our knowledge of it entirely 
to the clay tablets the people left behind them. 

[ 135 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


It is thought by scientists that the tribes of Erech 
came into the valley of the two rivers over six 
thousand years before Christ, or eight thousand 
years ago, counting from to-day. 


[136] 


CHAPTER X 


MAKING THE SUN WORK FOR US 

If you have read “The First Days of Man,” 
you will remember that when the Sun saw the 
hairy cave people learning so slowly to make their 
first bows and arrows, their stone-pointed spears, 
he rather laughed at them and their puny efforts. 
And Mother Nature, who was watching very 
carefully over the creatures God had placed in 
her charge, told the Sun that some day these 
Earth People would make even him work for 
them. The Sun did not believe such a thing pos¬ 
sible, but Mother Nature was right, just the 
same, as you will soon see. 

We have told about the ox-cart, and how the 
forest people made use of wheels in building their 
first wagons and carts. In other parts of the 
earth men were also building wheels, but they 
were of a very different sort, and were used for 
a different purpose. 

It may have been one of the men of the clay 

[ 137 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


country, or of that wonderful land along the 
Nile, or some thinker in far-off China, but some¬ 
where, we do not know where, some man used 
his brain to make things easier for himself and 
for the people about him by inventing the water 
wheel. 

If you had lived in those far-off days, and your 
father had told you to go down to the bank of 
the river every morning, and dip out water until 
dark by means of a bucket tied to the end of a 
swinging pole, you would not have liked it at all, 
I am sure, and before the long hot day was done 
you would probably have been very tired of it. 

Now, if you had been a dull and stupid plodder, 
as most people were in those days, you would 
have grumbled and fussed, of course, but you 
would have gone on dipping up water just the 
same, day after day, without trying to think of 
a way to make your task easier. 

But if you had been a thinker, and used your 
brains, you might have thought of two ways to 
get your work done for you. And both of these 
ways would have required the use of a wheel. 

In the first place, you might have said to your- 

[ 138 ] 


MAKING THE SUN WORK FOR US 

self, “It would certainly be much nicer if I could 
find a way to have that strong, lazy ox out there 
in the field do all this hard work for me.” And 
after thinking that, you might have made a 
framework or wheel out of bamboo, with buckets 
hanging all around the rim of it, and set it up 
between two posts driven into the bed of the river, 
and then, by means of a notched or gear wheel 
on shore you could have had the ox turn the 
wheel in the water and bring up a full bucket 
for you on the end of every spoke. This would 
have been much easier for you, since all you 
would have had to do then would have been to sit 
on the bank and empty the buckets as they came 
up, into a wooden gutter or trough leading to 
your ditch. But it would have required an ox to 
turn the wheel, as well as somebody to drive the 
ox, and you might not have had any ox. 

Or you might have thought about the matter 
in another and quite a different way. Suppose 
you had noticed that every time you dipped the 
bucket at the end of your pole in the stream, the 
swift current swept it along and sometimes 
almost pulled the other end of the pole out of 

[ 139 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


your hands. You might have said to yourself, 
“The current of the river is stronger than I am. 
Why can I not make it work for me?” 

This thing the river current used to sweep your 
bucket along is called Power, and it is by making 
use of Power that Man is able to do all the won¬ 
derful things he does to-day. And the power in 
the river current really came from the sun, be¬ 
cause the heat of the sun had turned the moisture 
of the sea, of rivers and lakes, of the land, into 
vapour, which, being lighter than air, had floated 
upward and formed clouds. And the snow from 
these clouds had fallen on the mountain tops. 
When the heat of the sun melted it again, it 
rushed down the mountain sides and into the val¬ 
leys with terrible force, strong enough to sweep 
aside huge rocks and boulders. These rushing 
waters hold power in every drop, and Man, in 
making use of this power, is really making the 
sun work for him. At Niagara Falls, and thou¬ 
sands of other places all over the world, the power 
of falling water is being used to turn wheels, 
driving mills and factories, or huge dynamos 
which make electricity, so that we can truly say 

[ 140 ] 


MAKING THE SUN WORK FOR US 


that the sun is running our trolley cars, and light¬ 
ing our houses, and grinding our wheat and corn. 

Now if you had been a bright boy on the banks 
of the Tigris, in Mesopotamia, or the Nile, in 
Egypt, or the Hoang Ho, in China, or the 
Ganges, in India, you might have thought about 
that power in the strong river current, and said 
to yourself, “If it is strong enough to sweep this 
pole out of my hands, why is it not strong enough 
to lift up this water?” Perhaps you might have 
been sure that the river was able to do your work 
for you, but you could not at first see how to make 
it do it. You might never have seen the way, but 
somebody did, and when you think of it, the way 
was simple enough. 

All that was needed was a bamboo wheel, with 
double spokes set side by side, and joined with 
flat boards or paddles. Such a wheel, set up in 
the river, on two upright posts, just as the wheel 
was set for the ox to turn, would be made to 
revolve by the current of the river sweeping 
against its paddles. You have no doubt made 
such a water wheel yourself, and set it up in a 
little brook or stream. Now suppose around the 

[141] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

outer edge of this wheel were hung little buckets, 
made, let us say, of short, hollow pieces of bam¬ 
boo. The wheel, in turning, would dip the 
buckets into the water, fill them, and raise them 
on the other side until they were within reach of 
your hands. As in the case of the ox-driven 
wheel, you would have nothing to do but sit on 
the bank and tilt the little buckets into the trough 
at the top. That would certainly be very much 
easier than dipping up the water yourself, and 
there would be no need for an ox, or another man 
to drive him. 

But that is not all. Presently you would have 
found a way to make the buckets tilt themselves 
into the trough, turning upside down when they 
reached the top, and then, so far as getting water 
from the river was concerned, you could go away 
and leave it. You would no longer have that 
stupid and tiresome labour to perform for the 
river would be doing it for you. And really the 
sun would be doing it for you. 

After a while, too, you would find that the 
turning water wheel could do a great many more 
things for you than just raise water. 

[ 142 ] 


MAKING THE SUN WORK FOR US 

For one thing, it could grind grain. 

Suppose the people of your country had for 
hundreds of years been making grain into coarse 
flour by pounding it in a hollow rock with a 
smooth round stone. If you had been a young 
girl, in those far-off days, you might have been 
very weary of making flour in that way. It was 
slow and tiresome, and as the tribes got larger, 
and more and more flour was needed to feed 
them, quicker and better ways had to be dis¬ 
covered. 

One of these ways was to take two round flat 
stones, called millstones, with holes in their 
centers, and place one on top of the other and 
turn it around. The grain, fed into the space 
between the two stones, was soon ground to flour, 
which ran out along little grooves cut in the 
stones. 

The upper stone had a long handle or bar 
fastened to it, and was turned by a man, often 
a slave. He had to walk round and round in a 
circle all day, turning the heavy stone. 

Later on, when the stones were made larger, 
an ox or a horse or a donkey was used in place 

[ 143 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

of the slave. But oxen, and horses, and donkeys, 
and even slaves, have to be fed, which costs 
money, and so men looked for other ways of turn¬ 
ing their millstones. And they soon found two. 

One was to use the power of rivers and streams. 
If water wheels could be used to raise water, they 
could just as well be used to grind flour. The 
axle of the water wheel, on which it turned 
around, was made longer, and on the end of it 
was a wheel with notches, or cogs as they are 
called, cut in its edge. There were other notches, 
of the same size, on the top of the upper millstone, 
or in a ring of hard wood fastened to it. When 
the cogged wheel at the end of the axle turned, 
it also turned the millstone by catching in the 
notches around its rim, and so ground the corn. 

The other way was just as simple. Men found 
out how to make wind wheels as well as water 
wheels, that is, they made wheels with sails on 
them, instead of wooden paddles, and when the 
wind blew it turned the wind-mill around, and so 
turned the millstones. 

Both wind-mills and water wheels are very 
ancient inventions, and yet both are in use to-day. 

[ 144 ] 


MAKING THE SUN WORK FOR US 

In Holland, a large part of which is below the 
level of the sea, the water is kept out by great 
walls of earth and stone called dikes, and along 
these dikes are hundreds and thousands of wind¬ 
mills, driving pumps to pump out the water that 
leaks in, and thus keep the country from being 
flooded. You have no doubt often seen such 
mills yourself, pumping water from wells to 
houses in the country, where there are no city 
water pipes. And wind-mills for grinding grain 
are still in use in many countries where men have 
not learned to use electricity, or steam. 

The same thing is true of water wheels. We 
have already spoken of the great power plants, 
such as the one at Niagara Falls, but there are 
small water wheels, used for grinding flour, in 
many places in the country, just as they were 
used thousands of years ago. 

In the case of wind-mills, too, it is really the 
sun that is working for us. When the sun’s rays 
heat up the air in one place, that heated air rises. 
And when it rises, other and cooler air rushes in 
to take its place, causing what we call wind. 

But it is not through wind and water only that 

[ 145 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

Man is able to make the sun work for him. He 
does it in many other ways. It is the heat of the 
sun that causes plants and trees to grow. With¬ 
out this heat they could not live. If you chop 
down a tree, and burn the wood in a fire to keep 
you warm, you are getting back the same heat 
that the sun used in making the tree grow. Or 
if you burn the wood to make steam, and drive 
an engine with it, the stored-up heat from the 
sun is what makes the engine go. Even the great 
beds of coal were formed from ferns and trees 
grown by the heat of the sun, and so when you 
ride on a railroad train the power which drives 
the engine comes from energy stored up millions 
of years ago by the sun. 

Rut you cannot make the sun or any of the 
other great forces of nature work for you unless 
you use your brains. Thousands of men are at 
work all over the world to-day, trying to find out 
new ways to make use of these great natural 
forces, and it is to the thinkers that we must look 
for the progress of the future. 


[ 146 ] 


CHAPTER XI 


THE BATTERING RAM 

Sargon, the great king, sat before his tent gaz¬ 
ing down over the Valley of Clay. He was sullen 
and angry, because he and his fighting men 
wanted to take the fertile valley for themselves, 
and the people of Sumer had defied him. 

The men of Sargon were called Akkadians, 
and they came from the west, between the coun¬ 
try of the two rivers and the sea. 

Instead of living peacefully in towns and vil¬ 
lages, as the people of the clay country did, cul¬ 
tivating gardens, raising flocks, building canals, 
making pottery, weaving, and working in metals, 
the men of Sargon were raiders and fighters, 
spreading over the lands to the east and taking 
whatever they liked. 

Travellers from afar, coming to Sargon, had 
told him of the men of Sumer who lived in towns, 
and stored up much wealth in grain, and cattle 

[ 147 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


and silver and gold, so the king of the people of 
Akkad made up his mind to march into the coun¬ 
try and conquer it. 

The more you read of history, the more you 
will see that wars are usually started because the 
people of one country, under some great leader, 
have coveted the lands of another people, and 
tried to take these lands away from them. Not 
all wars, of course, but by far the larger part of 
them. Man has always been a fighter. He had 
to fight from the very beginning. Enemies sur¬ 
rounded him on all sides. Not only did he have 
to battle against wild beasts, against other and 
more savage tribes, but also against heat and 
cold and hunger and storm and ice and snow. 
And of course, in struggling with all these things 
he became stronger and better able to endure. 
From this some people argue that war, even 
to-day, is a good thing, because it makes men 
brave and strong. 

This may have been true, as long as men fought 
face to face, with swords or spears in their hands. 
But it certainly is not true now, when wars are 
fought with poison gases, with airships dropping 

[ 148 ] 



SARGON, THE GREAT KING, WAS ANGRY 

[ 149 ] 




































THE BATTERING RAM 


bombs, with submarines blowing up ships and 
drowning hundreds of men. In the olden times, 
fighting did make men strong, but now strength 
counts for nothing. The weakest and smallest 
man can use a rifle or throw a hand grenade just 
as well as a trained athlete. The wars of to-day 
are in the hands of engineers and chemists who 
never see a battle, but do their work in labora¬ 
tories hundreds of miles away from the lines. 

In Sargon’s time, however, men fought with 
their hands. The warriors he led to battle car¬ 
ried long spears, swords, shields, bows and 
arrows, and slings. Their spears were tipped 
with copper or bronze, their shields covered with 
ox hide, or plated with brass, thick and strong, 
through which an arrow could not pierce, even 
when shot at close range. 

They swept down into the clay country like a 
raging flood, thinking that they would have an 
easy time of it conquering the peaceful dwellers 
in the valley. War, to them, meant two armies, 
cutting and slashing at each other on the field of 
battle, until one or the other lost heart and throw- 

[ 151 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

ing down their weapons ran away. This was the 
sort of fighting they were used to. 

But they had not gone far into the clay coun¬ 
try before they met something entirely different, 
something they had not fought against until now 
—a walled city. And this completely upset their 
plans for conquering the people of the river 
country. 

Many towns had grown up, in the land of 
Sumer. Sometimes the people of these towns 
would quarrel with one another, and a little war 
would start between them. And sometimes fierce 
nomads from the country outside, from the 
deserts to the southwest, the mountains to the 
north, would sweep down on them and carry off 
their cattle, and their grain, and their women. 

So in order to protect themselves, the people 
of the clay country, using the sun-dried bricks 
from their endless beds of clay, built walls about 
their towns, small ones at first, and later on high 
ramparts, which the raiding parties could neither 
scale nor batter down. 

This was a new thing in warfare, and when 
Sargon and his men came before the first walled 

[ 152 ] 


THE BATTERING RAM 

city they did not know what to do. They soon 
found that their swords and spears, and even 
their bows and arrows, were of little use to them. 
The people of the city, instead of lining up in 
the fields for a battle, went inside, closing the 
great wooden gates after them, and from the tops 
of their clay walls laughed at the attempts of the 
invaders to get at them. 

Seeing this, Sargon, after a talk with his cap¬ 
tains and head men, caused wooden ladders to 
be built, so that his warriors could climb to the 
tops of the walls. But the men of Sumer pushed 
the ladders away with long poles, or rolled heavy 
stones down on them, crushing them, or shot 
arrows at the Akkadians as they tried to climb 
up. A few, who managed to reach the top, they 
attacked and killed, so that at the end of the day 
the men of S argon went back to their tents, de¬ 
feated. 

It was because of this defeat that Sargon sat 
before his tent, sullen and angry. For a week 
he and his leaders had been trying to find a way 
to get into the town, but they had failed. 

Among the men of Sargon’s army was a young 

[ 153 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

man named Nebu. He was a worker in wood, 
making bows and arrows, handles for axes and 
spears, and many other things of this sort. Nebu 
was a master workman, with many under him, 
and it was he and his men who had built the lad¬ 
ders with which the army of Sargon had tried to 
scale the walls of the city. 

Sargon sent for Nebu, and when the worker 
in wood came before him, the king cried out in 
an angry voice: 

“Shall it be said that I, Sargon, King of the 
land of Akkad, am to be stopped by a wall of 
clay? Make me an engine wherewith to batter 
it down!” 

So Nebu, hearing the commands of the king, 
went to his tent, about which were the tents of 
his workers. And in the space between the tents 
lay many logs, and pieces of timber, and poles, 
from which to make spear shafts, and arrows, and 
the framework of shields. 

Nebu stood for a long time gazing at these 
things and thinking how he might do what 
Sargon the king had asked. 

Not far from his tent there stood a wall of 

[ 154 ] 


THE BATTERING RAM 


clay bricks which had once been part of a hut, 
but the men of Akkad, advancing toward the 
city, had broken down the hut so that only this 
wall remained standing. 

Suddenly Nebu lifted from the ground a heavy 
log, and holding it in his arms, drove the end of 
it with all his strength against the wall of soft 
brick. Once, twice, three times, he struck, and at 
the third blow the unburned bricks, crumbling be¬ 
neath the weight of the log, gave way, and the 
wall fell to the ground in a cloud of dust. 

Nebu smiled, and threw the log to the ground. 
He had found out what he wished to know. 

Calling his workmen to him he went out into 
the country until he found a tree, tall and round 
and thick, with no branches for a space many 
times the height of a man. This tree he com¬ 
manded his workmen to cut down. 

When the tree was cut, and the top of it sawed 
off, Nebu summoned more men, and together 
they dragged the mighty log to the camp. 

Then with poles and heavy timbers Nebu and 
his workmen built two strong towers, three times 
the height of the tallest man, and under these 

[ 155 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


towers, which were joined together at top and 
bottom, he caused rollers to be placed, so that 
they could be pushed along over the ground. All 
these timbers were held together with wooden 
pegs, and lashed with raw-hide. The fronts of 
the two towers he covered with the hides of 
freshly killed oxen, and between them he hung, 
by many strong raw-hide ropes, the great log he 
had cut in the forest. While the towers were 
being built he went to the workers in metal, some 
of whom had been to the Wonderful Isle and 
learned about bronze, and told them to make for 
him a bronze head or cap to fit over the end of 
the log so that the wood might not be splintered 
and broken when it struck against the wall. And 
because the ram is an animal which butts w T ith his 
head, the workers in metal fashioned the bronze 
cap in the shape of the head of a ram. For what 
Nebu had made was a battering ram. 

When the men of Sumer looked down from 
their walls and saw the strange engine with its 
brazen head rolling toward them they did not 
know what to make of it. So they shot arrows 
and cast stones against it, but the covering of ox- 

[ 156 ] 


THE BATTERING RAM 


hide turned their missiles aside, and the men 
behind the towers, who were pushing it toward 
the walls, were not hurt. 

Sargon sat in a gilded chair before his army 
and watched what Nebu and his men were doing. 
He did not believe they would be able to batter 
down the wall, but no one had thought of any¬ 
thing better. 

Along each side of the great log many ropes 
had been attached. When the ram had been 
brought close against the wall, the men behind 
the towers took hold of these ropes and at the 
word of command from Nebu drew back the 
swinging log as far as it would go. Then, all 
together, they drove it forward against the wall. 

The very first stroke shook the wall until it 
trembled, and the bronze head of the ram cut 
into the soft clay bricks, making a jagged hole. 

At the second and third strokes the hole be¬ 
came deeper, and soon great cracks began to 
show in the face of the wall, spreading out from 
the hole the ram’s head had made in every direc¬ 
tion. At the fifteenth stroke the crest of the 
wall tumbled down in a cloud of dust and at the 

[ 157 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

twentieth a space thirty feet wide fell in, and the 
army of Sargon sprang forward to the attack. 

The people inside the city, seeing their wall 
broken down, fled in a panic. Some, on either 
side of the breach, continued to hurl javelins and 
stones down on the invaders, but S argon’s men, 
holding their shields above their heads, rushed 
over the shattered bricks in safety. Within an 
hour they were masters of the city. 

Nebu’s invention of the battering ram placed 
the walled cities of the clay country at Sargon’s 
mercy, and before long he had taken them all, 
and made himself king of the land. He became 
a great ruler, conquering all who opposed him, 
and this he was able to do because of Nebu’s 
invention. 

The invention of the battering ram marked a 
great step forward in the art of war. Ever since 
the days when the first man sheltered himself 
from his enemies behind a rock or the trunk of 
a tree a fight has been going on between what 
are called methods of offence, and what are 
called methods of defence. When man discov¬ 
ered the sling, the bow and arrow, the boom- 

[ 158 ] 


THE BATTERING RAM 


erang, he was making use of weapons of offence. 
When he hid behind a rock, or made himself 
a shield, he was using weapons of defence. 
Armour, made of steel, was a weapon of de¬ 
fence until gunpowder, and bullets, made it use¬ 
less. When the use of cannon made new methods 
of defence necessary, men built forts of stone, 
and when larger cannon battered these down, 
made forts of steel. In the same way, cannon 
on ships, deadly weapons of offence, found an 
answer in armoured ships. The Merrimac , with 
its plating of iron, had the wooden ships of the 
United States fleet at her mercy until the guns 
in the revolving turret of the Monitor drove her 
away. Even to-day the long fight between meth¬ 
ods of defence and offence is going on. The use 
of poison gas, a weapon of offence, was answered 
by the gas mask—the airplane by the anti-air¬ 
craft gun, the trench with its tangle of barbed 
wire by the tank. 

But in Sargon’s day the fight between weapons 
of offence and defence had just begun. The wall 
of unburned brick was overcome by the battering 
ram. Now men began to find out ways to keep 

[ 159 ] 



THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


the battering ram at a distance from their walls. 
To do this they had to invent a new weapon of 
defence, which was a weapon of offence as well. 
This weapon was the ballista, sometimes called 
the catapult. 

Some early thinker among the fighting peoples 
found out a way to hurl larger stones at his 
enemies than could be thrown by hand, and how 
to hurl them farther. Stones flung by slings 
were too small to do much damage against troops 
equipped with shields, and hand-flung stones of 
any size could not be thrown very far. What 
men desired was to find out a way to hurl heavy 
weights a long distance, just as cannon, later on, 
were used to shoot balls of iron or stone. 

Among the forces that the early peoples soon 
learned to make use of was that stored up in a 
twisted cord or rope. 

We all know that if we tie a double piece of 
rope between two upright posts or trees, and then 
put a stick between the two ropes and twist it 
around, end over end, the more we twist it the 
harder it will be to keep on twisting it. 

Now suppose we let go of the stick. It will 

[ 160 ] 



CATAPULT USED FOR HURLING STONES 

[ 161 ] 














THE BATTERING RAM 


fly back in the opposite direction with great force. 

So the man who found out a way to hurl heavy 
stones against his enemies made use of this force 
in a twisted rope, which force is called torsion. 

He first made a framework of heavy timbers. 
Across the bottom were stretched two cords made 
of twisted raw-hide, as thick as a man’s wrist. 
Between these two cords was placed one end of 
an arm or beam made of wood. At its other end 
was fastened a basket, or cup, in which the stone 
to be thrown was placed. A heavy beam of wood 
across the top of the machine stopped the arm 
when it flew up, but the stone in the pocket at 
the upper end of it went on for hundreds of feet, 
smashing everything in its way. At one side of 
the machine was a windlass, with spokes to it like 
the spokes of a wheel, and after the arm had been 
lowered, and fastened in place with a latch, and 
the stone placed in the pocket, a number of men 
would turn the windlass around by means of the 
spokes, twisting the raw-hide ropes until the arm 
was ready to fly up like lightning, the moment 
the latch which held it down was released. 

This engine of war the Romans called the bal- 

[ 163 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


lista. Some people call it the catapult, but cata¬ 
pults were originally huge bows, used for shoot¬ 
ing great arrows and spears. 

It is easy to see that the ballista, mounted on 
the walls of a city, could smash and destroy a 
battering ram with its heavy stones long before 
the ram could be rolled into place against the 
walls. So for a time these stone-throwing engines 
were weapons of defence. 

But soon the attackers began to make use of 
them too, hurling stones so big that it took sev¬ 
eral men to lift them, and these great stones, 
smashing against the walls of a town, would 
batter these walls down just as the battering ram 
had done, so that the ballista became a weapon 
of offence, as well as one of defence. 

In another way, too, it was used. Bombs were 
made, of clay jars or baskets, and filled with ma¬ 
terials that would burn fiercely, such as oil or 
pitch mixed with sulphur, or a mixture of the 
same sort known as Greek fire, and these lighted 
bombs were hurled into towns, or against ships, 
to set them on fire. 

Some nations, such as the Persians, used ele- 

[ 164 ] 


THE BATTERING RAM 


phants to attack their enemies, driving the huge 
beasts into the ranks of the opposing army and 
causing them to crush all who stood in their way. 
War chariots were also used as weapons of of¬ 
fence, sometimes with sharp knives like scythe 
blades fastened to their wheels. When the horse 
came into wide use, fighting men were mounted 
on them, forming what is known as cavalry, and 
such bodies of horsemen, riding with their lances 
against men on foot, made a terrible weapon of 
offence. But the foot soldiers found a way to 
defend themselves, by using very long spears, and 
forming in solid ranks three deep, with their 
shields interlocking. The front row would kneel, 
the second crouch over, the third stand erect, so 
that they presented to the enemy a solid mass of 
shields, bristling with long, pointed spears, and 
such a formation was very hard for cavalry to 
break. 

So the struggle between offensive and de¬ 
fensive methods in warfare went on, from clubs 
and slings to spears and javelins and bows and 
arrows, to swords of bronze and steel, to shields 
and armour, to gunpowder, cannon, and ar- 

[ 165 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


moured ships and forts, and finally to high ex¬ 
plosives, poison gases, airships, submarines, and 
tanks. 

Where the struggle will stop no one knows, 
but while some of the thinkers were using their 
brains to find new ways to kill people, others 
were at work on wiser and better tasks, trying 
to discover new ways to heal the sick, to secure 
food, to get about from place to place, to do the 
thousand and one things that go to make up 
the world’s civilisation. And, as we shall see in 
the next chapter, one of the most important of 
these things was the art of writing. 


[166] 


CHAPTER XII 


THE WRITING ON THE WALLS 

From the very earliest times men knew how 
to speak to each other, even though at first they 
used only a few words, scarcely more than cries, 
or grunts. Even some of the animals can do that. 
As time went on, more and more words came into 
use, until finally a language was formed. But 
since each tribe or race, scattered in different 
parts of the world, used different sounds to mean 
certain things, their languages were different, 
too, which is why an Englishman cannot under¬ 
stand Chinese, without first learning what the 
words of that language mean, or an American 
understand Russian. 

But while spoken languages were used for 
many thousands and even hundreds of thousands 
of years, it was a very long time before men 
found out how to set down the things they 
thought and said by means of written marks and 
signs. 


[167] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

So far as we can tell, the first men to do this 
were the artists, with their rude pictures scratched 
on the rock walls of caves. If you had been a 
cave-dweller, and had cut on the surface of a flat 
piece of stone the figure of an ox, or a horse, an¬ 
other man, looking at it, and seeing it to be an 
ox, or a horse, would have had the same idea in 
his head that you had in yours. On seeing your 
picture of a horse, he would have thought of a 
horse himself, so that you had passed the idea on 
from your mind to his by means of a written 
mark or sign. That was the first writing, and 
of course it was picture writing. 

For a long time men wrote down their ideas 
and thoughts in pictures, queer little figures that 
looked like or suggested the things they had in 
mind. For instance, if they wanted to write 
down a sign or word for the sun, they drew a 
circle with a dot in the centre of it, while for 
water they drew a little wavy line, and so forth. 
But these were pictures of things . With such 
pictures it was very hard to write down ideas . 
Anybody could draw a rude picture of a boat, 
which is a thing. But how would you go about 

[ 168 ] 


THE WRITING ON THE WALLS 

making a picture of an idea, such as cold, or 
anger, or hunger, or thirst? 

So the picture writing did not go ahead very 
fast at first, because no one had thought of mak¬ 
ing different signs or letters stand for different 
sounds. All speaking is just the making of dif¬ 
ferent sounds. There are not very many of 
them. In our language we have an alphabet, 
and each letter in it has a sound, such as “A,” 
or “F,” or “T,” and when we pronounce such 
a word as, say, cow, we put together the three 
letters that make that sound, “c” and “o” and 
“w,” and write them down to mean cow, instead 
of drawing a picture of one. The advantage of 
this is that we can use these three letters in thou¬ 
sands of other words, having nothing to do with 
cows, while if we used the picture of a cow, it 
could be used for nothing else, and we would 
need a different picture for every word we wrote. 
In the same way, by means of our letters having 
sounds it is easy for us to write down the letters 
“song” to mean song, but it would be rather a 
hard matter to draw a picture of one. 

So you can easily see that the best sort of writ- 

[ 169 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


ten language is one which is based on an alphabet 
of letters having different sounds. But it took 
Man a great many thousands of years to find out 
the secret of the alphabet, and how to make use 
of it. 

At first the pictures, and the picture writing 
which men carved on the walls of their caves and 
houses and temples and tombs were only pictures 
of things. But after a time some of the early 
peoples, such as the Egyptians, found that their 
word pictures might be used to mean several dif¬ 
ferent things, and even ideas. For instance, sup¬ 
pose they had drawn the picture of a ring, such 
as the early peoples wore on their arms or 
fingers. That would have been the picture of a 
thing. But suppose they had had in their spoken 
language another word pronounced ring, as we 
have in English, meaning to ring a bell. Then 
they could have drawn a little bell inside the ring, 
and used the sign to represent the ringing of a 
bell, which is not a thing, but an abstract idea. 
In this way the little pictures came to have a 
phonetic, or sound meaning, as well as a thing 
meaning. After a while a great many of the pic- 

[ 170 ] 


THE WRITING ON THE WALLS 


tures came to have a sound as well as a thing 
meaning, but they were not the sounds of letters, 
as in our alphabet, but of whole words . And 
since there are thousands and thousands of words 
in even a simple language, there had to be thou¬ 
sands and thousands of pictures, too—not quite 
so many pictures as there were words, since some 
of the pictures, as we have seen above, might be 
used for more than one word, by changing it a 
little, but still so many that it would take years 
and years to learn them all. So, as most people 
did not have time to learn them, only a very few, 
the scribes and priests, knew how to write, or to 
read what had been written. The Chinese use a 
system of picture writing even to-day, and school- 
children in that country are obliged to spend 
years learning the thousands of word-characters 
in their language, in order to be able to read and 
write. I am sure you would not like to go to 
school in China. 

But the people of the great country between 
the rivers, whose walled cities were conquered by 
S argon, also began to make and use a written 
language, different from that used by the Egyp- 

[ 171 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

tians, and the fine clay they found everywhere 
about them helped them to do it. 

They, too, first began to write by making pic¬ 
tures of things, but they did not cut or scratch 
these pictures on stone, or paint them on papyrus, 
as the Egyptians did. Instead, they used flat 
pieces, or tablets, of clay. 

Now if you have ever tried to draw anything 
with a sharp-pointed stick on soft clay, you will 
know that it is very difficult to make curved lines, 
or indeed drawings of any sort, because the 
scratched-up clay gathers in a lump before the 
point of your stick, and also along the edges of 
the lines you draw, making them rough and 
ragged. For this reason the people of the coun¬ 
try of Sumer, whom we call Sumerians, found it 
very much easier to press marks into their clay 
tablets with sharp, wedge-shaped tools, instead 
of trying to draw them, and so the pictures of 
things made in this way soon lost their original 
shape, and did not look at all like the things they 
were meant for in the first place. For instance, 
instead of drawing a circle on his clay tablet to 
represent, let us say, the sun, the man of the 

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THE WRITING ON THE WALLS 


[173] 



















































THE WRITING ON THE WALLS 

country of Sumer would have pressed four little 
dents in the clay surface with his wedge-shaped 
tool, making a rough sort of a square, and not a 
circle at all. 

But this really made very little difference, be¬ 
cause by this time the marks on the clay were 
beginning to stand, not for pictures of things, 
but for sounds. And not for the sounds of whole 
words, but of syllables. This was a very great 
improvement over the word-picture method. 
Thus, if in Chinese the picture of a boat could 
also be used to mean a number of other things 
having the same sound, they were all still words . 
But the people of the clay country made figures 
for the sounds of the different syllables in their 
words, out of their original pictures. We can 
see how this would work, in English, by trying it. 
Take, for instance, the word “carpenter.” Sup¬ 
pose we had one little figure for the sound “car,” 
an oblong, let us say, made of four wedge-shaped 
dashes, which might originally have been a rough 
picture of a wagon or car. And suppose we had 
another figure for the sound “pen,” which might 
have been, originally, a drawing of a quill pen, 

[175] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


but which was now just a single wedge-shaped 
mark. And a third figure for the sound “ter,” 
two wedge-shaped marks, say, with a third across 
them, the original meaning of which had long ago 
been forgotten. Then we, using the Sumerian 
system, could write the word carpenter like this, 
a i ft- And, if we wanted to write an¬ 
other word, such as “carter,” we could use the 
first and last syllables, leaving out the middle 
one, like this, '• 

As you will see at once, the same syllable- 
sounds could in this way be used over and over 
in hundreds of different words, which was far 

better and simpler than the method of having a 

#■ 

picture for each word. But still it was not nearly 
as simple as having an alphabet with a letter for 
each sound. And because even this way of syl¬ 
lable writing was too slow and clumsy for every¬ 
day use, a great trading people living on the 
shores of the Mediterranean Sea finally worked 
out a written language with a single letter, in¬ 
stead of a syllable, for each sound. These people 
were the Phoenicians, the traders of the many- 
oared ships. Being a very busy people, they had 

[176] 


THE WRITING ON THE WALLS 


no time to waste on picture writing. That was 
all well enough for priests to use, in carving the 
walls of their temples, but it would not do for 
business, for it took too long to learn, and they 
wanted something quicker and easier, just as 
shorthand is used in business offices to-day. So 
they took a number of signs from other lan¬ 
guages, some from the hieroglyphics of the Egyp¬ 
tians, some from the wedge-shaped marks and 
characters used by the people of the clay country, 
some from the language of the men of the Won¬ 
derful Isle of Crete, giving each of these signs, 
or letters, a sound, just as we do now. Many of 
these letters had started out as pictures of things, 
but their original meanings had long ago been 
forgotten, and now they became merely letters 
in an alphabet. 

The Greeks, who, as we have seen, came down 
in their ox-carts from the north and settled in the 
Mediterranean country, took these letters from 
the Phoenicians, with whom they traded and 
fought, changed them a little, and used them for 
writing down their own language. Later on, the 
Romans took their alphabet from the Greeks, 

[177 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


whom they conquered, and this Roman alphabet, 
changed a little, is the one we use to-day. 

Some of the letters, such as “O” and “T,” are 
just the same now as they were in the alphabets 
of the Greeks and the Phoenicians. It is very 
interesting to think that we are using to-day 
letters that were in every-day use thousands of 
years ago, some of them just simplified forms of 
picture letters used on the walls of temples and 
palaces of ancient kings, or on the clay tablets 
of the people of the land of Sumer. 

There are a great many things about the art 
of writing which we cannot tell here. It would 
take many books, to tell all there is to be said 
on the subject. But, as we have seen in the chap¬ 
ter on the Thinkers, it was not until men found 
out how to write that their history and their dis¬ 
coveries could be set down and preserved for the 
benefit of those who came after them. It is be¬ 
cause we have learned how to read the picture 
writings of the ancient Egyptians, and the clay 
tablets of the Sumerians, as well as the languages 
of other dead and forgotten peoples that we are 
able to know to-day how these peoples lived, who 

[178] 


THE WRITING ON THE WALLS 

their kings and emperors were, what they wrote 
and said to each other, and thought about and 
did thousands of years before Christ. It was in 
the alphabet of the Phoenicians, improved by the 
Greeks, that the immortal poems of Homer were 
written, telling us of Helen, and of Achilles, and 
the siege of Troy, and of the adventures of the 
wandering Ulysses. What a priceless treasure 
we of to-day would have missed had the ancient 
Greeks not known how to write. 


[179] 


CHAPTER XIII 


THE HEALERS 

As we have already seen, while some of the 
thinkers were spending their time trying to find 
out new ways to kill people, others were learning 
how to heal them, when they were wounded, or 
cure them when they were sick. 

From the earliest times there were to be found 
in every tribe certain men and women to whom 
the people went when they were ill or hurt. 
These men and women were usually very old; 
sometimes they were witch doctors, medicine 
men, priests, who not only gave medicines to 
those who were sick, but also ordered sacrifices to 
be made, and did all sorts of queer things, such 
as beating on drums, ringing bells, burning in¬ 
cense and the like, to scare out of their patients 
the evil spirits which they thought had entered 
their bodies and made them ill. And some of 
the medicines they used were horrible messes 

[ 180 ] 


THE HEALERS 


made of dried and powdered toads, and the poi¬ 
son from serpents, and the hearts and other en¬ 
trails of birds and animals. No doubt a great 
many sick people, in the early days, died from 
the medicines that were given them. 

But although these ancient doctors used ter¬ 
rible medicines at times, and were as likely in 
many cases to kill their patients as to cure them, 
they did, after trying the juices from roots, and 
herbs, and flowers, growing all about them, find 
out certain drugs and medicines that were good 
for people, and helped to cure them. Some of 
these simple drugs are still in use. When you 
take a dose of castor oil, or quinine, you must 
not think that these things are something new. 
The early peoples had found out about many such 
simple drugs, and used them to heal the sick. 

As men became more civilised, however, they 
began to depend less and less on the beating of 
drums and the burning of sacrifices to cure their 
patients, and more and more on common sense. 
As far back as the days of Hammurabi, a king 
who ruled in the clay country after the time of 
Sargon, laws were made about the practice of 

[ 181 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


surgery, and we find that if a doctor operated on 
a man who had a severe wound, using a bronze 
instrument, and caused the man’s death, or 
opened an abscess in a man’s eye, and the man 
lost his sight, the doctor was punished by having 
his hands cut off. So we see that even in ancient 
Babylon, more than two thousand years before 
Christ, surgeons had to be careful in their opera¬ 
tions, and keep their instruments bright and 
clean, just as they do to-day. 

Even before the days of Hammurabi, both 
medicine and surgery had been practised for cen¬ 
turies in Egypt, that great country along the 
River Nile, in northern Africa. One of the most 
complete and perfect of all the records left us by 
these ancient Egyptians is a book on medicine, 
put together by the priest-physicians of that 
time. It is written, in a simple form of picture 
writing used only by the priests, on strips of 
papyrus, pasted together to form long rolls, and 
was found in an Egyptian tomb. The ancient 
Egyptians believed that the spirit of a dead per¬ 
son came back to his body, after death, and so 
they took the greatest care to preserve these bod- 

[ 182 ] 


THE HEALERS 


ies by embalming them, making them into mum¬ 
mies by wrapping them up in many folds of fine 
linen, soaked in the oil of spices and covered with 
bitumen, a sort of pitch. It is because of this 
belief that we are able to find, in the tombs of 
Egypt, so many relics and records of the past. 
If the Egyptians had buried their dead in the 
ground, as we do now, they would long ago have 
crumbled to dust, but sealed up in great tombs 
carved out of the solid rock, they remain to-day, 
with their wall pictures and writings, and their 
rolls of papyrus, to tell us of the life of a van¬ 
ished civilisation. 

From the papyrus mentioned above, as well as 
from others which have been found, we find that 
the ancient Egyptians knew a great deal, both 
about caring for the sick, and healing the 
wounded. They had dentists, as we have, to look 
after their teeth, surgeons, who could set broken 
limbs, using splints made of wood to hold the 
broken bones in place, treat fractured skulls, or 
perform delicate operations on the eye, and doc¬ 
tors, who knew how to cure fevers and many 
other diseases. 


[183] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

Men had for a long time known how to check 
the flow of blood from wounds, how to extract 
arrow heads, to treat the more simple injuries re¬ 
ceived in battle, but it was among the learned 
priests of Egypt that physicians first came to be 
known as such, although the people of India were 
not very far behind. 

We find in Egyptian tombs many delicate in¬ 
struments used by the surgeons of those days, 
such as lancets and probes, scissors, forceps and 
knives, and among the other operations we read 
about in the papyrus records is one for removing 
what is known as a cataract from the eye. Even 
false teeth were made in those days, and have been 
found in mummy cases, and some of the mum¬ 
mies, when unwrapped, are seen to have broken 
arms or legs which have been carefully set and 
healed. It is a very wonderful thing to be able 
to look to-day at the work of surgeons who have 
been dead five thousand years. 

The surgeons of India, after the discovery of 
iron and steel, used over a hundred fine, well- 
made instruments, including almost all the ordi- 

[184] 


THE HEALERS 

nary instruments which are used by modern sur¬ 
geons. 

But it is to the ancient Greeks that the doctors 
of our time owe their greatest debt. Hippoc¬ 
rates, the most famous of the Greek physicians, 
is called the Father of Medicine. 

He was born on the island of Cos, off the 
shores of Greece, nearly five hundred years be¬ 
fore Christ. As a young man he first studied 
the work of the Egyptian physicians, and soon 
began to improve on what they had done. His 
idea was to make medicine a real science, instead 
of hit-or-miss guesswork, and as he grew older 
he wrote books on the subject which, although 
written nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, 
are still of value to the student. 

Hippocrates was a great thinker, and also a 
wonderful physician and teacher. He described 
with the greatest care, in his books, the various 
diseases, with ways to cure them, and it was not 
long before his fame spread all through Greece 
and the near-by countries. He wrote on such 
things as fractures, dislocations, wounds in the 

[185] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

head, epidemics, and no physician who ever 
lived did so much to help the ill and the suffering 
as he did. For two thousand years his works 
stood to inspire the doctors and surgeons who 
came after him, and once more we see how val¬ 
uable it was for men to know how to write. 
Without a way of writing down and keeping the 
discoveries that Hippocrates made, a large part 
of his work would probably have been lost, for 
while it might be a simple and easy thing for a 
man to tell his sons how to make pottery, or 
bronze, it was a very different matter, when it 
came to telling them about medicine, or surgery. 
No man could possibly have stored up in his head, 
and remembered, all the things that Hippocrates 
wrote in his books. 

Books, in those days, were written either on 
rolls of papyrus, or on parchment, which is made 
from the dried skin of sheep, and is much the 
same as the skin used for the heads of drums. 
Parchment is very durable, and, if kept dry, will 
last for a long time. But, of course, since in those 
days the people of Europe knew nothing about 
printing, every book had to be carefully copied 

[ 186 ] 


THE HEALERS 

by hand, and for that reason books were very 
valuable, and were kept, for the most part, in 
libraries, where people might go to read them, 
just as they do now. Alexander the Great, about 
whom you will read in history, conquered Egypt, 
along with most of the other countries of the 
world at that time, and founded, near the mouth 
of the River Nile, a city, called after himself, 
Alexandria, and there, later on, a great library 
of the works of the ancient writers was brought 
together, with thousands of hand-written books, 
which students and scholars came from all the 
countries round about to read. 

It was at Alexandria that surgeons first began 
to dissect, that is, to cut up, the bodies of dead 
persons to find out what the organs and parts 
of the body looked like and how they worked. 
And it is said that some of the doctors of that 
time, eager to learn about the workings of the 
heart, and the stomach and the liver and the 
brain, cut up the bodies of persons while they 
were still alive, using for this purpose criminals 
who had been sentenced to death. But even in 
those far-off days such cruel methods were not 

[187] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


thought right, and many of the best physicians 
were against them. 

In Egypt and in India, and later, in Greece, 
in Rome, and in Arabia with its capital at Bag¬ 
dad, in the clay country, not far from Babylon, 
the study of medicine made wonderful progress. 
Then Rome was attacked and destroyed by sav¬ 
age tribes from the forest country of northern 
Europe, and for a time most of this learning 
was lost. Even the great library at Alexandria, 
of which we have told, was burnt, and the coun¬ 
tries of Europe went through a long period of 
ignorance which we now call the Dark Ages. 

It was only a few hundreds of years ago that 
people began to read and study and think again, 
and now we have modern medicine. 

No work which has ever been done by man is 
finer or more unselfish than the work of the phy¬ 
sician. The thinkers who have laboured from 
earliest times to heal the sick and bring health 
and comfort to the suffering, who have shown 
us how to save life, instead of taking it, deserve 
our deepest thanks. We owe a great debt of 
gratitude to the Healers. 

[ 188 ] 


CHAPTER XIV 

THE KING’S MESSENGER 

Once, a long time ago, there lived in that part 
of Asia which we call Asia Minor a boy named 
Xenes. 

Asia Minor means little Asia, and it is called 
that because it is very small compared with that 
part of Asia lying farther to the east, in which 
are such great countries as India, and China, and 
Siberia. 

But while Asia Minor is small, it had a big 
part in the early history of mankind, for it 
borders on that wide inland sea, the Mediter¬ 
ranean, around the shores of which men of science 
now think the civilisation of the world began. 
Across this sea travelled the Phoenicians, with 
their many-oared ships, the Cretans from the 
Wonderful Isle, the ancient Egyptians, and 
later on the Greeks, the Romans, and the men 
of Carthage, that great Phoenician city in north- 

[189] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

ern Africa which was a rival of Rome, and which 
the Romans finally destroyed. The history of 
the countries bordering on the shores of the Medi¬ 
terranean is many thousands of years old, and 
even now we know only a small part of it. 

In the days of Xenes the people of the coun¬ 
try in which he lived were beginning to be civi¬ 
lised. They lived, many of them, in towns, and 
collected property about them in the form of 
cattle and sheep and pigs and goats and pottery 
and rugs and copper and silver and gold. They 
did not have money, but exchanged things with 
one another, giving so many sheep for an ox, or 
a certain weight of silver for a rug, or so many 
measures of barley or wheat. 

Whenever people began to settle down in those 
days, to build villages and towns, to collect prop¬ 
erty and live in security and peace, there were 
usually other and wilder peoples, living in the 
country around them, in the mountains or the 
desert, who attacked and fought with them, burn¬ 
ing their towns, and carrying off the property 
they had collected. 

To prevent this, the people in the more civi- 

[190] 



WAK! 


[191] 


















THE KING’S MESSENGER 


lised countries not only built walls about their 
towns, as we have seen, but united the different 
tribes and towns into what we call a nation, which 
is very much like a tribe, only larger. Usually 
these nations had a ruler, or king, to lead them, 
and when the warlike tribes from outside tried 
to break in, it was the business of the king to 
call together an army from the different villages 
and towns in the land, and with this army fight 
to drive the enemy out of his country. 

This was one of the principal reasons why the 
early nations had kings; they felt safer, joined 
into a united people, with a ruler to lead them 
in battle, than they would have felt with each 
tribe or town fighting for itself. 

But it is very easy to see that if the enemy 
came without warning, as they usually did, and 
attacked the country suddenly, it took a good 
deal of time to let all the different villages and 
towns know that a war had started, and to get 
their soldiers ready, and march them to the place 
where the battle with the invaders was going on. 
While all this was being done, the enemy often 
had an easy time of it, burning and robbing to 

[193] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

their hearts’ content. So the kings and rulers had 
to find some way to send word around quickly, 
in order that every *one might get ready without 
loss of time. 

In these days, when we are able to talk across 
continents by telephone, and to telegraph mes¬ 
sages around the world in a few seconds, it seems 
a very easy and simple matter to send word to 
another town one or two hundred miles away, but 
it was far from being an easy matter then. 

Among savage tribes such as are to be found 
in Africa, messages are often sent long distances 
by means of tom-toms, or huge drums, the men 
in one village beating the alarm, and those in the 
next hearing it as it comes booming through the 
air and sending it along to still another place by 
beating on their tom-toms. And among the 
American Indians messages were sent from place 
to place by means of fires lit on the hilltops, the 
smoke by day and the flames by night carrying 
their signals of alarm from tribe to tribe. 

But in the country where Xenes lived mes¬ 
sages were sent by means of runners, and Xenes 


was a runner. 


[ 194 ] 


THE KING’S MESSENGER 

Even when a small boy he had been able to run 
more swiftly than any of his companions, and as 
he grew older, and his muscles became harder and 
stronger, he was easily the best runner in the 
town. 

The capital of the country was a great city 
called Sardis, and from there to the place in which 
Xenes lived was nearly two hundred miles. 

This place was not far from the foot of the 
mountains, and through them ran a wide, rocky 
pass, going up and up, winding about among 
the forest-covered hills until it was lost to sight 
in the shadows. 

It was through this gloomy pass that the 
enemy usually came to attack the towns and vil¬ 
lages of the plains. They were fierce and war¬ 
like, the§e men from the mountains, who rode 
tough, shaggy little ponies, and swept down over 
the country, robbing, killing and burning. 

Sometimes they would come in small bands, 
which did not stay long, but contented them¬ 
selves with making a quick dash and then run¬ 
ning back fo the hills before the men of the plains 
could attack them. But at other times they came 

[ 195 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

in a great swarm like locusts, and spread over 
the land in every direction, pillaging and burn¬ 
ing. Then it took a long time to get them out 

*» 

again. 

The ruler of the country in which Xenes lived 
was named Gyges, and he dwelt in his capital city 
of Sardis. For many years the nomads from the 
hills did not cause him and his people any trouble, 
but Gyges knew, from what had happened in the 
past, as well as from what he was told by wan¬ 
dering travellers from the hill country, that they 
would some day come again, swarming down into 
the plains to burn and kill and destroy. So 
Gyges chose swift runners in each of the villages 
and towns throughout the land, and built stations 
between these villages and towns, so that from 
one end of the country to the other there were 
speedy messengers to carry the news to him at 
his palace in Sardis. These messengers were not 
expected, of course, to run all the way from the 
outskirts of the country to the capital. They 
worked in relays, like the runners in a relay race. 
Each would go a certain distance as fast as he 
could, and then turn the message he carried over 

[ 196 ] 


THE KING’S MESSENGER 


to another runner who was waiting for him, and 
who would carry the message to the next station, 
and so on. In this way, if the enemy broke in, it 
did not take very long to send word from the 
frontier to the capital at Sardis. If a runner 
could cover thirty miles in four hours, six of them 
could make a hundred and eighty miles in a night 
and a day, and in a short time the whole country 
would learn the news and be ready for battle. 

Gyges gave orders that matches be held in 
every village and town, so as to find out which 
were the swiftest and best runners, and these were 
chosen to be king’s messengers, and carry his 
commands to and from the far-off parts of his 
kingdom. 

When the races took place in the town in which 
Xenes lived he was overjoyed when he proved to 
be the swiftest runner of all, and was picked out 
to be one of the king’s messengers. 

Near the mouth of the great pass which led up 
into the mountains Gyges placed sentinels, to 
watch for the enemy and report as soon as they 
should appear. If they came, word was to be 
sent to him at once. 


[ 197 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

Time passed, but no invaders appeared. The 
soldiers and sentinels of Gyges had heard many 
tales about these fierce barbarians, but they had 
never seen any of them, except a few straggling 
bands, and after a time they came to think that 
the terrible stories they had heard about them 
were not true. So instead of watching carefully 
day and night they grew careless, feasting and 
drinking, and sometimes they became drowsy 
and slept at their posts at the mouth of the pass. 
Xenes, however, did not become careless. He 
kept his muscles hard and strong, exercising and 
rubbing himself with oil. And when the captain 
of the guard at the mouth of the pass sent word 
to the king every few days that all was well, 
Xenes ran as fast and as hard as though the 
enemy had really appeared and were after him 
with their arrows and spears. 

One dark night, after a feast in honour of the 
great Mother Goddess whom these people wor¬ 
shipped, the guards at the pass were all asleep. 
And on that very night the barbarians came 
creeping down from the hills like shadows, their 
weapons in their hands. Finding the sentinels 

[ 198 ] 


THE KING S MESSENGER 


of Gyges asleep, they killed them, and then sent 
back word for the main body of their companions 
to come on. 

All during the night the invaders poured like 
a flood down through the pass into the valley, 
spreading out over the country. At last they 
reached the town in which Xenes lived, surround¬ 
ing it on every side so that not a soul could get 
out. Their bands of horsemen rode far into the 
country, so as to cut off and kill any one who 
might try to give the alarm. By morning there 
were thousands and thousands of them in the 
plains, with more coming through the pass every 
hour, until the country round about was black 
with them as far as the eye could reach. And 
Gyges, resting peacefully in his palace at Sardis, 
knew nothing of the danger which threatened him 
and his country. 

Xenes slept in a little hut on the outskirts of 
the town, close beside the main road leading to 
Sardis. Had the captain of the guard in the 
pass not been asleep, the king’s messenger would 
long ago have been speeding on his w r ay toward 
the capital, bearing the word of alarm. But the 

[ 199 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


captain was dead, by now, and no runner came 
to Xenes to tell him of the danger. The next 
messenger, thirty miles away, would wait in vain 
for Xenes to appear, and as he was forbidden to 
move until the tablet bearing the seal of the cap¬ 
tain of the guard had been turned over to him, 
he would no doubt be surrounded and killed. 

When Xenes awoke it was dawn, and distant 
cries and shouts from the town walls told him 
that something terrible had happened. He 
slipped on his sandals, tied a cloth about his waist 
and was ready to start. 

He stepped to the door of his hut and saw the 
invaders swarming everywhere about the walls of 
the town, shooting arrows, throwing stones with 
their slings, shouting their battle cries. They had 
taken no notice of the little hut, and did not know 
that in it was a king’s messenger, ready to run 
like the wind in the direction of the capital, giv¬ 
ing the alarm. 

Xenes looked carefully along the road he must 
take and to his dismay saw that it was crowded 
with the enemy as far as he could see, all going 
in the direction of Sardis. If they could get 

[ 200 ] 


THE KING’S MESSENGER 


there before the king’s armies could be made 
ready, the city might be captured, and Gyges 
taken and slain. 

Xenes saw at once that he could never make 
his way along the road to the next messenger, 
with the enemy in his path. And he felt sure 
that even if he did, there would be no runner 
waiting for him at the little roadside station, 
since the barbarians, on their swift ponies, would 
certainly capture and kill him long before Xenes 
could get there. So he made up his mind to take 
another and shorter course he knew, across the 
plains, and if necessary run all the way to Sardis 
himself. It was nearly two hundred miles, but 
he decided to do it or die in the attempt. 

But first he knew that he would have to escape 
from the hut and pass through the enemy’s lines, 
and this was likely to prove a very hard matter, 
if any one saw him. So far they had taken no 
notice of him at all. 

Just then one of the barbarians, passing by the 
hut, saw Xenes peeping out through the door, 
and ran in to kill him. 

Xenes, however, who was very quick, dropped 

[ 201 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

to his knees like a flash and tripped the other man 
up, so that he fell sprawling on his face upon the 
floor. 

In an instant Xenes was on his feet and snatch¬ 
ing up the short spear which had fallen from the 
barbarian’s hand, drove it through his body and 
killed him. Then, as quickly as he could, he took 
the clothes from the other man’s body and dressed 
himself in them. 

There was a peaked cap made of wool, a coat 
of tanned leather, woollen leggings and loose high 
shoes coming above his ankles. There were also 
weapons, a shield, a short bow, with arrows in 
a quiver, and the spear with its broad point of 
bronze. In a few moments Xenes had put on 
these things and stepped into the road. 

Although the sun had barely risen, he felt very 
warm and uncomfortable, for he was not used to 
thick clothes such as the people from the moun¬ 
tains wore. When he ran he wore nothing at all, 
except his sandals, and the loin-cloth about his 
waist. 

He did not go along the road to the west, 
through which the enemy was now streaming, but 

[ 202 ] 


THE KING’S MESSENGER 


turned back toward the pass, making a wide 
circle so as to reach some low hills at the other 
side of the town. As he walked along he limped, 
as though he had been wounded, and when some 
of the barbarians, passing him on their way to 
the town, called to him, he did not answer, but 
pointed to his leg as though in pain and hurried 
on. 

At last he reached the little range of hills, and 
hiding among the trees and bushes which covered 
them, looked out over the country. In every 
direction he saw the enemy bands, burning the 
villages, driving off the herds, killing the people. 
If he could only wait until nightfall, he would 
be safe. But there was no time to wait. So, 
burdened by his heavy clothes and weapons, he 
began to run, keeping himself hidden by the 
bushes and trees as well as he could. 

For hours Xenes ran. Whenever he came 
upon any of the enemy bands he slowed up, and 
trudged along as though on his way to join the 
main body. But as soon as he was out of sight 
he began to run again. He had no food, except 
a little fruit, and some scorched bread he found 

[ 203 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

among the ruins of a deserted village, but he 
went on and on, straining every nerve to get be¬ 
yond the enemy’s lines. 

The barbarians, stopping to burn and plunder, 
did not go as fast as he did and by the late after¬ 
noon he found that the smoke of burning villages 
and farms, which up to now had been ahead of 
him, was at last behind or on either side. Then 
he crept among some bushes and taking off the 
heavy clothes he wore, bathed himself in a cool 
stream. 

Now Xenes began to run in earnest. Swiftly 
as an arrow he sped through the night, some¬ 
times by narrow roads and paths, sometimes 
across fields which were rough and uneven, and 
hurt his feet cruelly. Once a group of the enemy, 
sitting about a camp-fire, spied him, and when he 
did not answer their cries shot at him with their 
arrows, but before they could mount their horses 
Xenes had vanished in the darkness. All night 
long he ran, the blood pounding in his temples 
until he thought they would burst, but there was 
no time to rest; he must keep on, if the country 
was to be saved. When morning came, Xenes 

[ 204 ] 


THE KING’S MESSENGER 

had run over a hundred miles in twenty-four 
hours, without rest or food. 

He thought now, as he paused beside a stream 
to cool his tired feet in the water, that if he could 
find the main road he might deliver his word of 
danger to one of the other messengers, and let 
him carry it on. But Xenes did not know where 
the main road was. And he could not be sure 
that some of the advance scouts of the enemy, on 
their shaggy ponies, had not ridden along it ahead 
of him. So he decided to keep out of sight and 
go on. Sardis, he knew, lay to the west. He 
could tell the direction easily enough by the sun. 

There was another reason, too, why Xenes did 
not want to turn his message over to any one 
else. It would have hurt his pride to ask for help. 
He was a king’s messenger, and he wanted to 
show Gyges that he could be depended on to do 
his duty, no matter what the cost. So after a 
little rest he sprang forward again, running, 
running, hour after hour through the hot sun 
until it seemed that his heart would burst or his 
legs give way under him. 

After a time he came to a village beside a road 

[ 205 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

paved with stone. Here the people gave him 
food and drink, but he ate very little. He told 
them of the invasion of the barbarians, but they 
said they had seen nothing of them, and some did 
not believe him, claiming that if the enemy had 
come, the runners along the road would have 
brought the news. 

Xenes did not stop to argue with them. 
Sardis, they told him, was still a long distance 
away, so after a brief rest he was off again, very 
tired and foot-sore, but still determined to reach 
the capital by morning. 

All the second night he ran, driving his tired 
body onward, his head reeling from fatigue, his 
feet bleeding, but his courage as strong as ever. 

The last few miles were the hardest, and it 
seemed to him that he could never make them, 
but he kept on, along the edge of the stone-paved 
road. Once he opened the station of a runner, but 
the man in it was asleep. No messenger from the 
east had come flying in to awaken him. For a 
moment Xenes was tempted to give up, and allow 
the other man to take his place, but his pride 
would not let him, and he staggered on. 

[ 206 ] 


THE KING’S MESSENGER 


At last, just as the rising sun broke through 
the mists, Xenes saw the walls of Sardis ahead of 
him. The gates were just being opened for the 
day. Gasping for breath he stumbled up to the 
guards and telling them that he was a king’s mes¬ 
senger, asked to be taken before Gyges at once. 

At first the men laughed at him. No one could 
wake up the king at such an hour, they said. 
But Xenes begged so hard and seemed so much 
in earnest that finally they took him to the palace, 
one man helping him on each side, for by now 
Xenes could scarcely walk. 

When Gyges heard the story the captain of the 
guard brought him, he rose from his couch and 
came into the audience chamber where Xenes 
stood, gasping for breath. With a cry the boy 
stepped forward, fell upon his knees. 

“The barbarians are coming!” he exclaimed, 
then fainted. 

Quickly Gyges gave orders to his captains, and 
runners were sent in all directions, summoning 
his armies. He was a wise ruler, and knew that 
Xenes told the truth. An hour later, when the 
boy, strengthened by food and drink, told his 

[ 207 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


story, the king listened in wonder. None of his 
messengers had ever before run nearly two hun¬ 
dred miles in two days and nights. When Xenes 
had finished, Gyges took his own gold chain and 
placed it about the boy’s neck, ordering that he 
be given every honour and care. Then he went 
out to take command of his troops. Other run¬ 
ners had come in by now, bringing the alarm, but 
it was not until night that the first of the bar¬ 
barians arrived before the city walls, and to their 
surprise and disappointment Gyges and his men 
were ready for them. 

A long and bloody war followed, and it was 
years before Gyges was able to drive the enemy 
out of the country, but he did it at last, and all 
the people gave honour to Xenes, the king’s mes¬ 
senger, who by his pluck and courage had saved 
his country and its capital from destruction. 

When we look back and think of the danger 
the people of the early nations were in, because 
they could not send word from place to place 
quickly, we can see how important it was to be 
able to spread the news. Hundreds of years 
later, all through the country of Gyges, and the 

[ 208 ] 


THE KING’S MESSENGER 

valley of the two rivers, a new and greater na¬ 
tion rose, and these people, called the Persians, 
used relays of horses, instead of runners, to carry 
messages from one part of their kingdom to an¬ 
other. That was five hundred years before 
Christ, and from then down almost to our own 
time, post horses for carrying the mails, and 
couriers on horseback riding swiftly across the 
country from place to place were the only ways 
that people had to send the news about quickly. 
You will all remember the famous ride of Paul 
Revere. 

But after steam locomotives came into use, 
and the telephone and telegraph were invented, 
everything was changed, and now we read in the 
newspapers each morning at breakfast about 
things that have happened a few hours be¬ 
fore, in China, or South America, or Australia, 
just as though they had happened next door. 
Think how long it would have taken, in George 
Washington’s time, to bring news from Pekin, 
or Moscow, to Philadelphia. People heard of 
things months and even years after they had hap¬ 
pened, or often never heard of them at all. 

[ 209 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


Knowledge of ways to spread the news has 
changed the world, and made it smaller and 
smaller until now it is just like a village, in which 
everybody knows in the morning what has hap¬ 
pened to his neighbours the night before. 


[ 210 ] 


CHAPTER XV 


THE TRADERS 

When Orus was a small boy he used to sit on 
the shore beside his father’s house and watch the 
ships going to and fro over the blue waters of 
the harbour. 

Orus lived on the Wonderful Isle of Crete, and 
his father was the captain of a ship, and was 
away from home for weeks and weeks at a time, 
so that Orus did not see him often. 

When his father came back from his voyages, 
however, Orus was always very eager to hear 
the stories he had to tell of other lands to which 
he had gone. 

“Why do you go to these strange places?” 
Orus asked his father one day, “and what do you 
do there?” 

His father laughed, and tried to explain. 

“I go to trade,” he said. “A long time ago, 
when the earth was young, and there were only 

[ 211 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

a few people here and there, everybody had what¬ 
ever they needed. Of course they did not need 
much, for in those far-off times all anybody 
wanted was food to eat, and skins to wear, and 
flint or copper for their axes and spear heads. 

“But all that was long ago, and no man living 
can remember the days of it, or number the years 
that have passed since then. I have heard my 
grandfather say that he has seen pictures on the 
rocks across the sea that were carved when men 
knew nothing of metals, and used tools of stone, 
but I have never seen them myself. It must have 
been thousands of winters ago, but only the gods 
know how long. 

“After a while people began to build towns 
and cities, like our great city of Cnossos, where 
dwells Minos, the king, and to build ships, too, in 
which they might sail to other lands. 

“So when men from one place went to another 
place, whether by ships, with oars and sails, or 
by caravans, winding their way across mountains 
and plains, they took with them the things of 
which they had plenty, and exchanged them for 

[ 212 ] 


THE TRADERS 


things of which they had none. And that, my 
son, is trade. I have just come from a great 
country across the sea called Egypt, where people 
live along the shores of a mighty river, and lift 
water from the river with wheels, to spread on the 
land and make things grow. These people also 
have ships, and bring from the lands of the south 
wonderful things, sweet spices, and ivory, which 
comes from the tusks of a huge beast you 
have never seen, and jewels, richly carved, and 
papyrus, which is made from the outer skin of 
reeds, and is used to write on, and a fine white 
cloth called linen, softer and cooler than that 
made from wool, and sweet-scented woods, for 
carving, brown, and red, and some black as night. 
And in that country they have pitch, which comes 
out of the earth, and is used in building ships, 
and many strange animals and birds which we do 
not have here. 

“So if we want those things, we must carry to 
that country other things, that they have not, or 
of which we have more than we need, such as fine 
bronze and other metal work, tin, which we bring 

[ 213 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

from the cold islands of the north, rugs and car¬ 
pets of wool, from the east, and oil from the great 
fish our sailors kill, and many other things. 

‘‘The people of that land give us, in exchange 
for what we bring, the things we want, and in our 
ships we carry them back home with us. 

“And sometimes we go to a great city called 
Tyre, where men live who are skilled in the dye¬ 
ing of cloths. From the bodies of tiny shellfish 
that live in the sea they press a dye, and with it 
colour cloth a beautiful red-purple which is 
greatly prized for making king’s robes, and no¬ 
where but in Tyre is this wonderful dye made. 

“Down to that city and to others near it come 
caravans from the countries to the east and north, 
bringing carpets of wool, of many colours, and 
cattle, and sheep, and leather, and jewels, from 
the mountains, and copper, and silver and gold, 
and cedar wood from the great forests near by, 
and the skins of beasts, all of which we bring 
back for our workmen to use. 

“That is why our ships go from place to place, 
to the east and to the west, to the north and to 
the south, setting their courses by the sun and 

[ 214 ] 


m 



DOWN TO THAT CITY COME CARAVANS 

[ 215 ] 





















































































THE TRADERS 

the stars, daring the wind and the waves, the heat 
and the cold, that there may be beautiful things 
for people to see and wear and use in our Island 
of Crete. 

“Some day, when you are older, I will take 
you with me to these strange lands and let you 
see their wonders for yourself. In the country 
of Egypt I have seen images cut from solid rock 
twenty times as tall as a man, and pyramids of 
stone so high that their pointed tops reach almost 
to the stars. But even in that country there is no 
finer city than our own Cnossos, for it is the most 
splendid city in the world.” 

When the father of Orus was telling his son 
about trading, as he knew it thousands of years 
ago, he was telling the story very much as it is 
to-day, except for one thing. In those early 
times men did not use money. They exchanged 
things, one for another, so many sheep for a horse, 
so many measures of grain for a pig, so much 
cloth for a pottery jar, or a bronze sword. But, 
as it is easy to see, this was often a very awkward 
way in which to trade. Caravans, toiling for hun¬ 
dreds of miles over deserts, or through rough 

[ 217 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


mountain passes, might not want to exchange 
their spices or their rugs for ivory, or linen, or 
glass. They might want something else, which 
the people with whom they were trading did not 
have. But all they could do, before men began 
to use money, was to take what they could get, 
and carry it to some other place where the people 
had what they wanted, and this was not easy, 
especially if the things were heavy and hard to 
carry. A man with furs, meeting a man with 
grain, for instance, could not trade very easily 
if the one who had furs to sell did not want 
grain, but wanted a rug, and if he took the grain 
in exchange, he might have to carry it a long 
distance to some place where people had rugs to 
sell. If he could have sold his furs for so many 
pieces of gold, he could easily have carried the 
gold away in his pocket and bought with it what 
he pleased. So, to make trading simpler and 
easier, people began to use money. 

At first all sorts of things were used as money. 
In ancient Rome ten sheep were held to equal 
one ox, just as we have ten dimes in a dollar, and 
among the Greeks, too, the value of things was 

[ 218 ] 


THE TRADERS 

so measured. But think how hard it must have 
been to buy and sell things in that way. Suppose 
you wanted to buy a suit of armour worth twenty 
sheep. You would have had to go shopping driv¬ 
ing a flock along with you. What men needed as 
soon as they began to trade in a big way was 
something that was easy to carry, and which, 
because it was precious and rare, had about the 
same value everywhere. So finally men began 
to use the metals, copper, silver and gold. 

Before then, however, many other things were 
used as money, sea shells and beads—we have all 
heard of the Indian’s wampum—iron, the feath¬ 
ers of rare birds, measures of wheat and other 
grain, cocoanuts, tea, even tobacco, as you will see 
by reading about the early colonists in America, 
before the Revolutionary War. In those days a 
man could buy a farm, a silk dress, or even a wife, 
for so many hogsheads of tobacco. 

But money, to be of use in trading in different 
countries, had to be valuable in all those coun¬ 
tries. Feathers of*birds might be,of value in the 
South Sea Islands, but they would not buy any¬ 
thing in places where people had no use for bird 

[ 219 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

feathers. And tea or tobacco would be of no 
value in countries where people did not use such 
things. But the rarer metals, such as silver and 
gold, are valuable everywhere, because they are 
rare and hard to get everywhere. So in course of 
time they came into use as money, for wherever 
you went people would accept them in exchange 
for what you wanted to buy, just as you would 
accept them yourself in exchange for what you 
had to sell. 

Money, then, we see, was something in which 
the value of other things could be measured, and 
expressed, something which could easily be car¬ 
ried about, which had the same value everywhere, 
and would keep that value from year to year 
without any great change. It was also something 
that could be divided. If an ox were equal to ten 
sheep, and you wanted to buy only five sheep, you 
could not very well cut your ox in half, while a 
piece of gold or silver could easily be cut in two 
without injuring it. 

The precious metals are the only things that 
men have found so far that will fill all these needs, 
and that is why gold and silver, and to some 

[ 220 ] 


THE TRADERS 


extent, copper, are used for money to-day. Of 
course we use paper money, but that is only a 
sort of check, a promise to pay. If you look at 
a paper dollar you will see that by taking it to 
the United States Treasury in Washington you 
can exchange it for a silver or a gold dollar if 
you want to, but nobody does, since metal money 
in large amounts is awkward to carry about. For 
instance, you could carry a ten thousand dollar 
note in your vest pocket, if you were lucky 
enough to have one, but ten thousand dollars in 
silver you could not even lift, and in gold it would 
be a very heavy load indeed, for a man to carry 
about all day. In olden times stamped pieces 
of leather were sometimes used for money, as we 
now use paper. 

Among the first users of metal money were the 
Chinese, who made coins of copper and iron, as 
did the early Hebrews. The Greeks and Romans 
also used iron coins, but before this time gold 
coins or pieces were used in the country of Gyges, 
which was called Lydia. Lydia was a great 
trading nation, with seaports on the Mediter¬ 
ranean across the water from Crete, and one of 

[ 221 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

its kings, named Croesus, became so rich that even 
now we speak of a very wealthy man as being “as 
rich as Croesus.” Not long ago a number of 
stamped gold coins were dug up in the neighbour¬ 
hood of the ancient capital of Sardis, which are 
among the oldest known coins in the world. 

But even before stamped coins were made, 
pieces of gold and silver were weighed and used 
as money. There are ancient Egyptian pictures 
which show heaps of gold and silver rings being 
weighed in the scales. Pieces of gold and silver, 
when they first began to be used as money, were 
always weighed, to find out their value. Later 
it became the custom to stamp on these pieces 
or bars first the purity or fineness of the bar, and 
then its weight, to save the trouble of weighing 
them over every time they were used. But this 
did not work so well, since people would shave 
off some of the bar and keep it, without it being 
known that the weight had been reduced. So 
finally it was found easier to stamp the metal in 
the shape of coins, with milled edges. You may 
have wondered why it is that coins have these 
milled edges, that is, have tiny grooves across 

[ 222 ] 



ANCIENT COINS 

Also stamped Bars, and Rings and Ornaments, used as money. 

[ 223 ] 































THE TRADERS 

their edges all the way around. It is done to 
keep people from cutting gold or silver off the 
coins, as they could easily do, without any one 
knowing it, if the pieces had smooth edges. 
Cubes of gold, stamped with their fineness and 
weight were used in China a long time ago, but 
whether before or after the gold pieces of Lydia 
we do not know. 

While ancient coins were made in many dif¬ 
ferent shapes, almost all the nations finally came 
to use the round, flat pieces of money we are now 
familiar with. Usually the head of a king or 
other ruler is used on the coins, with devices of 
various sorts, not only to make the coins attrac¬ 
tive, but to render it hard for counterfeiters to 
imitate them. It is a crime for any one to make 
money except the government, and even if you 
were to make a gold piece with the same amount 
of gold in it as the government uses, it would 
still be a crime, and you could be put in jail for 
it. Governments have found it necessary to 
make all money themselves. If others were al¬ 
lowed to do it, the country would soon be flooded 
with all sorts of coins, good and bad, and no- 

[ 225 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


body would know which ones were the good ones 
and which were not. 

We can easily see, now, how valuable to the 
early traders money must have been. A caravan, 
travelling for many weeks from China into Per¬ 
sia, bringing its precious loads of silks, could sell 
the bales it brought for gold and silver, which 
the traders could easily carry back with them, or 
could take to India on the way home, exchang¬ 
ing it there for ivory, or jewels, or fine silver 
work. Or a ship from Tyre, with its famous 
purple cloth, came to Egypt, let us say. The 
master of the ship might want tin, from Crete, 
which the Cretans had themselves brought from 
Cornwall, on the coast of England. He could 
sell his purple cloth to the merchants of Egypt 
for gold, brought probably from Ethiopia, or 
Abyssinia, take the gold to Crete and buy tin 
with it to carry back for the bronze workers of 
his city of Tyre. 

Money made trading easy. It did a very great 
deal to bring about the quicker spread of civi¬ 
lisation among the different nations and peoples 
of the earth. Without it, men could not have 

[ 226 ] 


THE TRADERS 

traded with one another the way they did, and 
the spread of ideas, and arts, and inventions 
from one race to another would have been much 
slower. So when you think of gold and silver, 
you should remember that they, too, as well as 
iron, have had a part in the earth’s history far 
more important than their mere use for making 
bright and shining ornaments. Even to-day 
gold is the basis of all money, of all trading be¬ 
tween nations, and this makes it of the utmost 
value to mankind. 


[227] 


CHAPTER XVI 


THE STATUE OF THE KING 

Ani was the son of Khenshotp, and lived in 
Egypt along the banks of the Nile, near a city 
called Memphis. 

His father was an architect and builder, and 
a very great man under the rule of the king, 
whose name was Chephren. 

This King Chephren was a rich and mighty 
ruler, and like King Cheops, who came before 
him, had a passion for building splendid monu¬ 
ments, and temples, and statues of stone. 

It was King Cheops who built the great pyra¬ 
mid near Memphis, of which you have no doubt 
seen pictures. It is a huge pile of stone blocks, 
nearly five hundred feet high and one of the 
greatest works ever built by man. And it was 
King Chephren who built the second of these 
three huge pyramids which still stand there near 

[ 228 ] 


THE STATUE OF THE KING 


the banks of the Nile, wonderful monuments to 
the skill and patience of men who lived over five 
thousand years ago. 

These three pyramids, and the stone Sphinx 
near them, rise from a stretch of high level 
ground called a plateau, and leading up to this 
plateau King Chephren caused a splendid road to 
be built, at the entrance to which was erected a 
stone gateway in his honour. 

In this gateway he ordered that a statue of 
himself should be placed, and it was to his archi¬ 
tect Khenshotp that he entrusted the carrying 
out of these great works, giving him much money, 
and thousands of slaves, with which to perform 
his tasks. 

These things took many years to build, and 
while the work was going on, Khenshotp’s son, 
Ani, would go day after day with his father to 
watch the workmen as they split the huge blocks 
of stone with wedges, or cut them with copper 
saws having teeth made of a hard black sub¬ 
stance called emery, or fed emery dust into the 
saw-cuts as the copper blades went deeper and 
deeper. And he saw the stone-workers dress off 

[ 229 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

the faces of the blocks with pieces of harder stone 
held in their hands, until they were smooth and 
ready to be set into place. Then the slaves would 
come, hundreds of them, with rollers of hard 
wood, and ropes, and under the whips of the 
slave-drivers would pull and haul and strain un¬ 
til the great blocks were moved to the places fixed 
for them in the plans. But most often Ani would 
go to the sheds where master workmen were 
carving ornaments and statues with tools of 
stone, and of copper, with hard jewels set in their 
points, for fine work, cutting the toughest stone. 
And as the years went by, Ani thought that he, 
too, would like to be a master sculptor, and carve 
beautiful things. 

As he grew older he made himself a workshop 
in one of the many rooms of his father’s great 
house, at the far end of the walled garden, and 
here he would spend hours every day, chipping 
and carving statues of animals, and men, and 
gods. But because his father was such a great 
man, and so busy with the work the king had 
commanded him to do, Ani did not tell him of 
his ambition to become a master worker in stone, 

[ 230 ] 


THE STATUE OF THE KING 


thinking that his father might laugh at him. But 
year after year he watched the other master 
carvers, and because he was the son of Khen- 
shotp, the king’s architect and builder, they 
gladly taught him all they knew. 

With one of these master workers, whose name 
was Kheti, the young sculptor would talk for 
hours about the carvers of old, and the work they 
did. 

From the most ancient times, so Kheti told 
him, there had been men who loved to make pic¬ 
tures and carve statues of the things they saw 
about them, at first just simple heads and fig¬ 
ures of clay, or bone, or rude drawings scratched 
on bits of slate, and later, queer little statues of 
wood, and ivory, and stone, with the two legs 
joined together, and staring eyes made of white 
shell beads. And in the great collection which 
Khenshotp had gathered in his house Kheti 
showed his pupil these ancient statues, and brown 
pottery vases with figures on them in red, heads 
and whole figures of men and animals cut in lime¬ 
stone, and other heads of wood, and great lime¬ 
stone slabs with pictures carved on them, which 

[ 231 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


Khenshotp the builder had taken from the ruins 
of ancient cities, and placed in his collection. 

Kheti also told the boy of the great statues, 
and rock carvings, and temples of other lands, of 
which he had heard from travellers, winged bulls 
of stone as big as a house, statues of warrior kings 
carved in the sides of mountains, huge and terri¬ 
fying, and figures of mighty gods, to which men 
and women and children were sacrificed. 

Because of the things that Kheti told him, Ani 
came to understand that in all ages, in different 
parts of the world men have worked in clay and 
wood and metal and stone, striving to make beau¬ 
tiful things, and these men, Kheti explained, were 
artists, to whom God had given the great task of 
bringing beauty to the world. 

All these things Ani thought about, and treas¬ 
ured in his heart, for he, too, wanted to create 
something beautiful, that might live after him, 
instead of going through life idly and being for¬ 
gotten, as most men are. So year after year he 
worked away at his blocks of stone, always try¬ 
ing to make each one better than the one he had 
done before, but none of them satisfied him, and 

[ 232 ] 


THE STATUE OF THE KING 

he would break them with his hammer and begin 
a fresh one. 

He did not show his work to any one but Kheti, 
and the old man, seeing him turn away in anger 
one day from a figure of Anubis, the God of 
Darkness, that he had just carved, spoke to him, 
for he knew that Ani was a great artist. 

“My son,” he said, “why do you destroy the 
beautiful things you have made?” 

“They are not good enough,” Ani replied. “I 
must do better,” and went on with his work. 

Among all the things which King Chephren 
had commanded his chief builder Khenshotp to 
make for him, the hardest of all was the statue of 
the king which was to stand in the gateway of 
the road leading to the plateau of the pyramids. 

This statue Khenshotp wanted to make the 
greatest glory of his life, and for that reason he 
sought for a long time among the master carvers 
of the land, trying to find one who was worthy 
of the task. But while the work of many of them 
pleased him, and he found it good, there was no 
one whose skill equalled that of the famous 
sculptor Septh. And Septh was an old man, 

[ 233 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


whose strength was failing him, so that he feared 
to undertake so great a task as to carve a statue 
of the king. 

At last, however, Khenshotp persuaded him 
to try it. A huge block of stone was brought to 
the shed behind the house where Septh lived, and 
he set to work. 

Each day Khenshotp came to see how the 
statue of the king was getting along, and as the 
lines of the head began to show from the solid 
rock, the heart of the chief builder became glad, 
for he saw that the figure the old sculptor was 
carving would be one of the finest in all Egypt. 

One evening, as Khenshotp sat with his son 
Ani in his walled garden, listening to his slaves 
play upon the harp, a messenger came running 
in with dreadful news. Septh, the great sculptor, 
was dead. He had fallen before the king’s 
statue, his hammer and chisel in his hands, leav¬ 
ing his work undone. 

The heart of Khenshotp was heavy. Who 
now would be able to carve the statue of the king. 
He went to look at the figure on which Septh had 
been working, but it was only just begun, and 

[ 234 ] 


THE STATUE OF THE KING 

with a sigh he turned away, and ordered the door 
of the workroom sealed. 

There was but one thing to do. He would 
command all the best sculptors in the kingdom to 
each make a statue, and from them Chephren 
himself should choose the one he liked best. 

But Ani, who had stayed behind in the de¬ 
serted workroom of Septh, gazed at the unfin¬ 
ished statue and wept, because so beautiful a 
thing as it would surely have been could not now 
be given to the world. 

As he stood there, Kheti came, bringing work¬ 
men to seal up the door, and told Ani of the 
orders his father had given, that all the master- 
carvers of the land should make statues of the 
king, so that Chephren himself might choose the 
one which best pleased him. It was Kheti’s 
thought that Ani should try his hand as well. 

“None can do better,” he told the young 
sculptor. “It may be that yours shall please 
Chephren above all the others. Will you not 
try?” 

Ani, standing before the unfinished figure of 
the king, had a sudden thought. 

[ 235 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


“Seal up the door, Kheti,” lie said, “but leave 
you an opening where no one can see it, by which 
I may come and go.” 

So Kheti, who saw what Ani had in mind, sent 
away the workmen who had brought the mortar 
and stones, and himself sealed up the door. But 
in a corner of the wall he set a loose slab, which 
might be turned aside, leaving a hole through 
which a man could crawl. 

When Kheti had gone, Ani lit an oil lamp 
which stood in the work-room, and taking the 
hammer and chisel with which Septh had been 
working, went up to the rough block of stone. A 
feeling of wonder, of joy, came over him; it 
seemed to him that the spirit of the dead sculptor 
stood at his side, guiding his hand, telling him to 
have no fear. With a smile of confidence on his 
face, Ani set his chisel against the stone and 
raising his hammer, struck. 

The day for judging the statues of the king 
had come. Chephren, in a litter of ivory and 
gold borne by eight Ethiopian slaves, headed the 
procession which made its way from the city to 
the great gateway at the entrance to the pyramid 

[ 236 ] 



ANI SET HIS CHISEL AGAINST THE STONE 

[ 237 ] 
























THE STATUE OF THE KING 


road. Behind him came priests and soldiers, cap¬ 
tains and officers of the court, followed by a vast 
throng of people, all eager to see the work of 
the master-sculptors. 

Along the front of the wide gateway ten fin¬ 
ished statues had been set up, each covered with 
a cloth of purple linen embroidered with gold. 
Not only the king, but even a statue of him, was 
looked on as sacred in those days, and had to wear 
royal robes. 

The great king descended from his litter and 
sat upon a throne of ebony, inlaid with gold and 
rubies and sapphires and other precious stones, 
which had been placed in front of the statues. 
Over the throne a blue and gold canopy kept 
away the hot rays of the sun, while slaves on 
either side fanned the king with huge fans made 
of brilliant peacock feathers. Khenshotp, the 
master-builder, knelt before Chephren, awaiting 
his orders. Then the king commanded the statues 
to be unveiledo 

As each of the sculptors, one after the other, 
drew the covering from his work, the king gazed 

[ 239 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


at it eagerly, but no smile came to his face, al¬ 
though every one was watching him for some 
sign. At last all ten of the statues stood in a 
row facing him, great figures of stone, splen¬ 
didly carved, but without that look of life we see 
only in the work of those rare men who are in¬ 
spired by genius. 

The king sighed and shook his head, and all 
the people sighed with him, for none dared to 
think differently from the way the king thought, 
no matter what their own ideas might be. 

Khenshotp bent before the throne in humble 
sorrow. 

“Master,” he said, “we have done our best.” 

The king gazed at him, frowning. 

“Bring forth the unfinished statue of Septh,” 
he commanded. 

Khenshotp hastened to give his orders, send¬ 
ing Kheti with many slaves to bring the statue 
before the king. Ani, who had hurried on ahead, 
entered the dark chamber as soon as the work¬ 
men had broken down the door, and threw a 
costly robe over the figure on which he had been 
working. Then, with the help of the slaves it 

[ 240 ] 


THE STATUE OF THE KING 


was swung between two great wooden beams 
with ropes, and carried before the king. 

“If Septh had but lived,” Khenshotp groaned, 
“we could have placed before the king a statue 
worthy of him, but, alas, it is but a thing begun.” 

“Let it be uncovered,” Chephren commanded, 
“that I may look upon it.” 

Quickly Ani drew aside the cloth which 
shrouded the figure, and a shout went up from 
the crowd as they saw the look upon the king’s 
face. The statue which Ani had finished was 
noble, commanding, a thing of beauty and 
power. Even Septh himself could not have 
made so great a work of art. Khenshotp stood 
speechless, thinking a miracle had been performed 
by the gods. 

But Chephren, who was a very wise king, saw 
the look of pride on Ani’s face and smiled. 

“Who hath dared to finish,” he asked, “the 
work which my servant Septh began?” 

Ani threw himself on his knees before the 
throne. 

“It was I, O King of Kings,” he answered, 
“hoping to please thee.” 

[ 241 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

Chephren raised his hand, in which glittered a 
jewelled sceptre. 

“I, Chephren, Lord of the Upper Kingdom 
and of the Lower, command that my servant Ani 
shall henceforth be master of all carvers of stone 
within my kingdom, and none other shall be held 
worthy to fashion the image of the king!” 

So Ani rose from his knees, the first sculptor 
in Egypt, and the statue of King Chephren, 
carved so many thousands of years ago, has been 
found among the ruins of the forgotten gateway 
and now stands in a great museum, for every one 
to see, one of the finest works of art made in 
ancient Egypt. 

But it was not in Egypt alone that men were 
carving these beautiful things in stone. We find 
splendid statues and carvings on temple and pal¬ 
ace walls in many other places, Babylon, As¬ 
syria, the ancient cities of India and China, even 
among the great ruins of the past in Mexico and 
Peru. 

In Egypt, as in other places, however, men 
grew careless in their work, instead of always 
trying to make it better, as Ani did, and for a 

[ 242 ] 


THE STATUE OF THE KING 

time much of the great art of the sculptors was 
lost. It was not until almost three thousand 
years after the time of King Chephren that it 
once more reached great heights, and this time 
it was in Greece. 

Greece, you will remember, was the country 
across the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt, which 
was conquered by men who came down in 
wheeled ox-carts from the forests of the north. 

They were rough, almost barbarians, at first, 
but after hundreds of years they grew civilised, 
in their new homes, learning much from the dark¬ 
haired people they had conquered, and as they 
grew civilised, they began to think about art and 
beauty. 

Great sculptors among them, such as Phidias, 
and Praxiteles, carved figures in marble so beau¬ 
tiful that no man has ever equalled them since, 
and when you go through some museum and see 
such splendid works of art as the winged “Vic¬ 
tory” of Samothrace, the “Venus” of Melos, from 
which the arms have been broken, as the head has 
been broken from the “Victory,” or the beau¬ 
tiful figures of Apollo, or Hermes, or Aphrodite, 

[ 243 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


you will see statues which were carved by the 
sculptors of Greece before the time of Christ. 

From the rude little images which the early 
men made of clay and stone, down to these splen¬ 
did figures of marble, so life-like that as you look 
at them you almost expect to see them move, was 
a long road, and it took a great many thousands 
of years for men to travel it, but, as we have seen 
in other things, there have always been thinkers 
and dreamers to carry on the progress of the 
world. We should each of us, no matter what 
our part may be, try, as Ani the sculptor did, to 
make our work better and better, and not be con¬ 
tent with things that are just “good enough.” 
That is the only way to go ahead. 


[ 244 ] 


CHAPTER XVII 


SLATES 

We have seen, in reading about the great 
pyramids of Egypt, that slaves were used to build 
them, toiling day after day in the hot sun under 
the whips of the drivers. And perhaps you have 
wondered how it happened that some men were 
slaves, and had to work for others in this way. 

The reason is a simple one. Most of these peo¬ 
ple became slaves through war. 

A great conqueror, such as Sargon, who took 
the cities of the clay country of Mesopotamia, 
made the people whom he conquered slaves. He 
might kill them, or make them work for him, as 
he pleased. 

As we have read in the chapter on making the 
sun work for us, the early peoples were always 
trying to find new sources of Power. 

Just as we do things by steam power, or elec¬ 
tric power, to-day, the men of those times did 

[ 245 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


things by the power of animals, and wind, and 
water, and other men. 

While they found ways to make horses and 
oxen work for them, pulling their carts, turning 
their water wheels, ploughing up the soil, or to 
make the swift currents of rivers, and the wind, 
work for them, driving mills to pump their water 
or grind their flour, they did not know how to 
use these sources of power on a big scale, as we 
do now. 

Their wind-mills and water-mills might grind 
a little grain, but they were of no use at all when 
it came to building great temples or cities, huge 
piles of stone such as the pyramids of Egypt, 
or the Great Wall of China, two thousand miles 
long, with enough material in it to make a wall 
three feet thick and eight feet high all the way 
around the earth. 

Such works as these call for power so vast 
that we can hardly measure it, and we are only 
now beginning to find out how to use the power 
in nature to do such things. When we see a huge 
steam shovel doing the work of fifty or a hun¬ 
dred men, we can understand how it was possible 

[ 246 ] 



SLAVES OP THE KING 


[ 247 ] 



























































SLAVES 


to dig the Panama Canal, and when we see a 
powerful derrick or crane lift masses of steel 
weighing a hundred tons, we can understand how 
it is possible to build a battleship, or a great 
bridge. 

But in those far-off days, when kings and em¬ 
perors wanted to carry out some great work; 
when there were canals to be dug such as those 
which spread for hundreds of miles over the coun¬ 
try between the two rivers, or walls to be built 
such as those of Babylon, said to have been so 
thick that four chariots could drive abreast on 
top of them, or great stones like the obelisk in 
Central Park, New York, to be carried many 
miles from the quarry where they were cut to the 
places where they were to stand, or blocks of 
stone like those in the pyramids, weighing many 
of them over fifty tons, to be cut, and moved, and 
lifted into place, we can see at once that the only 
power men had in those days was man power, 
and that is why conquered people were made 
slaves. 

We, in our times, think of slavery as a wrong 
and terrible thing, and so it is, but in those days 

[ 249 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

people did not think of it in that way. There 
was certainly no need to build the pyramids, and 
the labour of the slaves who worked on them was 
wasted. But not all the great works done by the 
rulers of the past were so useless. The canals of 
Mesopotamia, of which we have spoken, by irri¬ 
gating that country, caused it to blossom and 
bear fruit from end to end, and since only by man 
power could those canals have been built, we can 
see that in such works, at least, the rulers were 
right to gather the conquered people into bands 
and make them work for the good of the nation. 

The same thing is true of the Great Wall of 
China, which was built to defend the Chinese 
people against the attacks of the fierce Mon¬ 
golians to the north. Such great tasks require 
organisation, that is, require that men should 
work, not each for himself, but all together for 
the common good. And in those days the 
larger part of the people were too lazy and ig¬ 
norant to get together and do these things on 
their own account, so they had to be made to do 
them by some one else, or the things would not 
have been done at all. 

[ 250 ] 


SLAVES 


Even to-day we have something of the same 
sort in our armies. When war comes, it will not 
do to let men, or even groups of men, act for 
themselves. They must act together, under of¬ 
ficers who have the power to tell them what to 
do, and in a way the fighting armies of to-day 
are not very different from the slaving armies of 
the past. There is, however, this difference; the 
men in armies to-day, if they are fighting for 
their homes, their country, do so, or should do so, 
willingly. Any other sort of war is a crime, and 
should not be fought at all. 

In making use of man power to do the dif¬ 
ferent sorts of work we have read about above, 
the early peoples soon found new ways of apply¬ 
ing that power. One of these was the lever. We 
all know how, by placing one end of a long stick 
or bar under a stone, and pressing down on the 
other end, we can raise the stone, even though, 
without the bar, we could not lift it at all. Such 
a bar is called a lever. It does not create new 
power, but only makes better use of the power 
we have. For in order to raise the short end of 
the lever, and the stone, a few inches, we have 

[ 251 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

to press the long end down several feet. Thus 
we lose in distance, but gain in the weight we 
can lift. 

In the same way men found out how to make 
use of the block, or pulley, with a rope through 
it running over a wheel, to raise heavy weights, 
and the screw, which you see to-day in the ordi¬ 
nary jack-screw, with which you can raise an 
automobile just by turning the screw around 
with a lever or bar. They found out how to use 
wedges, too, for splitting wood, or stone, and the 
windlass, a wheel or drum on which a rope is 
wound when it is turned around by means of 
handles or bars. The capstan on a ship is a wind¬ 
lass, and is used for hauling up the anchor. 

But while the ancient peoples, in lifting and 
moving heavy blocks of stone and the like, made 
use of levers and pulleys and jacks, these things, 
as we have said, did not give them new power, 
but only made it possible for them to make better 
use of the power they had. And that power, as 
we have seen, was chiefly man power. 

The really interesting thing about the use of 
man power in early times is not so much that 

[ 252 ] 


SLAVES 


some men were free and some were slaves as it 
is that man, by using his brain, is slowly coming 
to make nature, instead of other men, do his work 
for him. 

You will hear a great deal about the hand¬ 
worker and the brain-worker, even to-day, and 
you will find that there is constant bitterness and 
quarrelling between them, because some think 
that the hand-worker does not get enough for his 
labours, and that the brain-worker gets too much. 

But if you will think about it you will see that 
there is one kind of brain-worker who is work¬ 
ing for the hand-worker all the time, although 
some of the hand-workers do not admit it. 

These are the scientists, the chemists, the en¬ 
gineers, the inventors, the great body of men who 
really think. 

Look back over the thousands of years that 
have passed since man first began to walk erect, 
to be different from the animals. The thinkers 
have been the ones who have made things easier, 
whether they invented bows and arrows with 
which to get food, or irrigation, to give the peo¬ 
ple rich crops, or wind and water wheels to grind 

[ 253 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

their corn, or a thousand and one other things 
that are slowly making it less and less necessary 
for one man to labour for another. 

The progress has been, and still is, slow, yet 
only a very few years ago thousands of labourers 
were digging ditches that steam shovels are dig¬ 
ging to-day, thousands of stokers were sweating 
in the boiler rooms of ships that are now being 
driven by oil engines or electricity. And we 
have only just begun. Before long all the la¬ 
bourers who dig in coal mines will be gone, be¬ 
cause we will no longer use coal for fuel and 
power. Some of that power will come from our 
rivers and streams, harnessed to great water 
wheels for making electricity. Some of it may 
come from the use of the wind, the waves, the 
tides, in ways we do not yet know. Some will 
come from the heat inside the earth, deep pipes 
being driven down and water run into them to be 
heated by volcanic fires. Some will come from 
the sun itself, not indirectly, through the use of 
water power, or coal, but directly, the heat of the 
sun as it shines down on us being turned into 
power. Alcohol, made in vast quantities from 

[ 254 ] 


SLAVES 


vegetable matter, will be used to run engines in 
place of the gasoline which comes from our les¬ 
sening supplies of oil. New ways of producing 
power may be discovered by scientists at any 
time. When Man has at last become master of 
the forces of Nature these forces alone will he 
his slaves. 


[255] 


CHAPTER XVIII 


THE GOLDEN GIRDLE 

Gurm the trapper lived on the edge of a great 
dark forest of oaks and pines in the central part 
of what is now called Europe. 

While the people about the wide inland sea, the 
Mediterranean, were building cities, carving fig¬ 
ures of their kings and gods, sailing the ocean in 
ships, making fine cloth of cotton and linen, work¬ 
ing in pottery and bronze, the tribes of the great 
forest country in which Gurm lived were leading 
a very much more simple and primitive life. 

The time had not yet come for these rough, 
hardy people to load up their ox-carts and move 
toward the warmer countries of the west and 
south. In fact they knew nothing about these 
countries, and were content with their simple 
forest life. 

Gurm lived with his father and mother, his 
brothers and sisters in a house built of logs. 

[ 256 ] 


THE GOLDEN GIRDLE 


There was a big stone fireplace at one end of it, 
at which the cooking was done. The roof of the 
hut was made of thick sods, held in place by flat 
stones, so that the wind could not blow it away. 
In the single room of the house the whole family 
slept on the floor, wrapping themselves in skins 
and huddling close about the fireplace in winter, 
to keep themselves warm. At the far end of the 
same room slept the cattle, cows and sheep and 
goats, crowding together to keep away the cold 
winter blasts. 

The people of Gurm’s tribe milked the cows 
and the goats, and made cheese of the milk they 
did not drink. They had rough pottery vessels, 
jars and bowls, moulded by hand, not turned 
smooth and round on a revolving stand or wheel, 
such as the people of the south had by now learned 
to use. They cut down the pine trees in the for¬ 
est with fine, polished axes made of hard stone, 
and sawed the logs into pieces with flint saws, 
or hewed them into timbers with stone adzes. 
Their clumsy carts, as we have seen, had great 
round wheels of solid wood, and were drawn by 
sturdy oxen. 


[257] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


They used fish hooks and nets, to catch fish 
from the rivers and lakes, while small game they 
shot with bows and arrows, or caught in traps. 
They had dogs, fierce animals something like the 
police dogs we see to-day, and these dogs they 
used in hunting deer, and bear, and other large 
animals. But they had no horses, as the nomad 
tribes had, and as they used furs from the ani¬ 
mals they killed to keep themselves warm, they 
did not bother to weave rugs of wool, as the shep¬ 
herd tribes did. But they made a coarse white 
cloth from the fibres of a plant called flax, which 
cloth is known as linen, and they wove some cloth 
of wool, too, and made clothing of it. But for 
the most part they used furs and leather. 

In the clearings about their villages they 
planted and raised grain, barley and wheat, and 
vegetables with tender roots, good to eat, such as 
our parsnips, and turnips, and beets. They 
ploughed the ground with rough wooden ploughs 
drawn by oxen, and cultivated it with hoes made 
of wood and stone. They ate wild fruit, such as 
crab-apples and berries, and took the honey 
stored up by the bees during the summer to make 

[ 258 ] 


THE GOLDEN GIRDLE 


sweet drinks with, and use on their cakes of bar¬ 
ley and wheat. 

The reeds from marshes and the tough grasses 
from the fields they used for making baskets 
and ropes. Their needles were fish bones, their 
weapons, stone or copper pointed spears, axes, 
bows and arrows, and heavy clubs with spikes of 
copper or flint in their heads. 

Living such a rough and hardy life, these for¬ 
est people became very fierce and strong. They 
had to fight storms, bitter cold and ice and snow, 
savage wild beasts, as well as the enemy tribes 
about them; in fact, their lives were largely spent 
in fighting. 

They traded a little, not much, with the other 
tribes they met, bartering the soft, rich furs of 
the animals they trapped for things brought from 
distant lands, gold ornaments, weapons of cop¬ 
per and sometimes of bronze, bright shells and 
bits of stone to be strung on wires of gold and 
used as jewels, and many other things. 

Gurm, who spent his days in the forest, trap¬ 
ping, was very much in love with Vana, the 
daughter of one of the richest men in the tribe, 

[ 259 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


and in order to win her he wanted to lay at her 
feet beautiful things, just as young men do to¬ 
day. And the only way he could get such things 
was by trading the furs of the animals he caught, 
for them. So he worked very hard. 

Gurm knew of several ways to trap the ani¬ 
mals he sought, but the one he used most was 
made in this manner. 

He would find a place in the forest where the 
animals had made a path, going down to the bank 
of the river to get water. Along this path he 
would pick out a tough, strong young tree, or 
sapling. With his knife he would trim all the 
branches from the sapling, and at the end of it 
he would tie a stout cord of twisted flax, made 
into a noose. Into the ground beside the path 
he would drive down a strong peg, with a notch 
in it. Then he would bend the sapling down and 
catch the end of it under the notch in the peg. 
The noose he would spread loosely around the 
peg in a circle, and at the end of the bent sap¬ 
ling he would tie a bit of meat, or the root of 
a vegetable for bait. Then he would put some 
more bait on the ground, about the peg. 

[ 260 ] 



[261] 


GDRM WAS A SKILFUL TRAfPER 
































































































































































































THE GOLDEN GIRDLE 


The animal he wished to trap, going along 
the path to the river, would smell the food and 
turning aside begin to eat it. First he would 
eat the food lying on the ground, and when that 
was gone he would take the bait at the end of 
the sapling in his mouth and tug at it, trying 
to pull it away. All of a sudden he would pull 
the end of the sapling loose from the notch in 
the peg, and it would fly up in the air, at the 
same time tightening the noose about his neck. 
When Gurm came along the next day he would 
find the animal he had trapped hanging dead at 
the top of the sapling. 

All through the winter Gurm worked, skinning 
the soft, glossy furs from the bodies of the ani¬ 
mals he caught, and bringing home the meat for 
food. But the skins he cleaned and made ready 
to be used for thick, warm garments, and stored 
them away. 

In the spring men would come wandering 
through the forest passes from other tribes to the 
south and west, where the land was not covered 
with thick woods, but was open, with grassy 
fields and plains. These men liked the furs that 

[ 263 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

Gurm offered, for their country was cold, too, 
in winter, and they brought many things in ex¬ 
change for them, but Gurm took only bits of 
gold and bright shining jewels, which he meant 
to give to Yana. 

There was another young man in the tribe who 
also loved Vana, and his name was Brenn. 

This Brenn was a bigger man than Gurm, 
and a stronger one. He spent his time hunting 
and fighting, and laughed at Gurm and his lit¬ 
tle traps. He had a two-handed sword of bronze 
that he had taken from an enemy he had killed 
in battle, and when he swung the great blade it 
whistled through the air like the wind, ready to 
cut a man in two at one blow. Brenn often swung 
his sword when Gurm was about, looking at him 
fiercely as though to show what he would do to 
any one who got in his way. Gurm, who was as 
brave as he was clever, only laughed, which made 
Brenn more angry than ever. Over and over he 
would ask Gurm what he did with the bits of 
gold, the bright-coloured jewels he got in ex¬ 
change for his furs, but Gurm would not tell him. 

To keep them safe, Gurm had placed his treas- 

[ 264 ] 


THE GOLDEN GIRDLE 


ures in a deer-skin bag which he hid in the hollow 
of a tree in the forest. He meant, when he had 
enough, to have Lok, the smith, make for him 
a broad golden girdle, with a jewel set in each of 
its flat plates. With this girdle Gurm planned 
to go to Vana and ask her to be his wife. He felt 
sure she would marry him, for no woman in the 
tribe had ever had so splendid a girdle as the one 
Gurm had in mind. 

One evening Gurm went to the tree in the 
forest to add to his treasures a bit of bright green 
stone he had gotten in exchange for some otter 
skins. 

Looking carefully about to see that no one was 
watching, he drew aside the bushes at the base 
of the tree. Behind them was an opening about 
as big around as a man’s body, leading into the 
great hollow trunk. 

Gurm stuck his head and shoulders into the 
opening and after digging about for a few mo¬ 
ments in the soft rotten wood at the bottom of 
the hole, drew out his deer-skin bag. With a 
smile he opened it, counted the jewels, weighed 
the lumps of gold in his hand. Lok, the smith, 

[ 265 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

had told him how many links there would be in 
the girdle, how much gold he would need. He 
thought, now, that he had enough, and made up 
his mind to see the smith the next day. 

He put the bag back in place, covering it up 
carefully. As he rose to his feet he saw a dark 
figure flit away through the shadows about the 
trees. He could not be sure, but it seemed to 
him that it was Brenn, watching him to find out 
his secret. 

Gurm smiled to himself, and waiting until 
Brenn had vanished in the darkness, took the bag 
from its hiding place and tied it to his belt. Then 
he went back to the village, where the people of 
the tribe were gathered about the steaming pots, 
the joints of meat roasting on spits, making ready 
for the evening meal. He saw Brenn watching 
him, but said nothing, and when he had eaten, 
he went in secret to the shed behind his father’s 
house where he kept the snares and other gear 
he used in trapping. 

Without letting any one see him, Gurm took 
the big deer-skin bag in which he brought home 
his pelts from the traps, and placing a long coil 

[ 266 ] 


THE GOLDEN GIRDLE 


of rope inside it, threw the bag over his shoulders 
and disappeared into the forest. 

As soon as he got to the tree he set to work. 
First he tied one end of the rope to the empty 
bag. Then he threw the other end over a strong 
limb of the tree, about fifteen feet from the 
ground. This done, he filled the bag with stones, 
and taking hold of the loose end of the rope, 
hauled the bag up to the limb. It was very 
heavy, with its load of stones, and it took all 
Gurm’s strength to pull it up. To hold it there, 
he tied the loose end of the rope to a root, then, 
climbing the tree, he dragged the bag of stones 
into a crotch, where it rested safely. Then Gurm 
climbed down again and, untying the rope from 
the root, arranged the end of it into a slip-knot, 
or noose, about the opening into the hollow tree. 
To hold the noose in place around the opening 
he used little pegs made of sharp thorns, stuck 
into the soft bark. 

Then Gurm took more stones, filling the 
leather sack about his waist in which he carried 
food, and climbing up into the tree again, put 
the stones into the larger bag. Several times he 

[ 267 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


did this, until the bag lying in the crotch was 
filled to the brim. When all was ready, Gurm 
sat down in the crotch beside the bag of stones 
and waited. He believed that, when all the peo¬ 
ple of the tribe were asleep, Brenn would come 
creeping through the darkness to the tree to 
steal his treasure. 

For a long time Gurm waited, watching the 
stars through the tree tops, but no one came. 

At last he heard a rustle of leaves at the base 
of the tree, and peering down, made out the dark 
form of a man, pushing aside the bushes which 
grew about the hole. With every muscle taut, 
Gurm took hold of the great bag of stones, wait¬ 
ing for the moment to spring his trap. 

With his keen eyes he pierced the darkness, 
and saw Brenn stick his head and shoulders in¬ 
side the opening, searching about in the hollow 
of the tree for whatever might be hidden there. 

Then Gurm lifted one end of the bag of stones 
and putting forth all his strength, tumbled it 
from the crotch to the ground. 

With a swish it fell, and as it fell it drew the 

[ 268 ] 


THE GOLDEN GIRDLE 


noose tight about Brenn’s waist and lifted him 
high in the air. When Gurm got down from 
his perch the unfortunate Brenn was dangling 
by his waist twelve feet from the ground, cursing 
and shouting and waving his arms and legs about 
like mad. But there was nothing he could do. 
The noose held him so tight that there was no 
chance to escape from it; he could only hang 
there, his feet on one side, his head on the other, 
like a bag of meal. 

Gurm laughed softly and left him. But be¬ 
fore he went he took Brenn’s two-handed sword 
from the ground beside the tree, where Brenn 
had placed it. 

In the morning Gurm came back to laugh at 
his enemy and taunt him, but Brenn could make 
no reply, for he was half dead from exhaustion 
and pain. The rope cut him cruelly in spite of 
his heavy leather coat, and he could only beg 
Gurm in whispers to let him down. 

This Gurm agreed to do, but before he did so 
he made Brenn swear, by the gods of the earth, 
and the forest, and the sky and the river and the 

[ 269 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

hills that he would let Vana alone, so that Gurm 
could make her his wife, and also that Gurm 
should have his great two-handed sword. j 
All these things Brenn swore, upon which 
Gurm cut the bag of stones loose from the rope 
and slowly lowered Brenn to the ground. But 
he had the two-handed sword ready, in case 
Brenn proved false to his oath. 

But the bully had had enough. There was no 
fight left in him. Beaten, afraid, he slunk back 
to the village. 

Then Gurm had Lok the smith make the girdle 
for Vana, of twenty plates of gold, each as broad 
as the palm of his hand, with a bright-coloured 

stone in the centre. And when Vana saw the 

« 

beauty of the cunningly wrought girdle, she loved 
Gurm more than ever, and agreed to become his 
wife. 


[ 270 ] 


CHAPTER XIX 


GODS AND MEN 

In the beginning, men began to think of gods, 
or of a god, for two reasons. 

One was gratitude, the other fear. Gratitude 
for blessings which had been given them, and fear 
of harm which might be done them. 

If you had lived away back in those early times, 
you would have felt that way, too. When you 
saw that fire drove away wild beasts and kept you 
warm, that the sun made things grow, that the 
great river, overflowing its banks, watered your 
garden and gave you rich crops, you would have 
been grateful for these blessings, and felt that 
you should worship the power that gave them to 
you, by prayer and sacrifice, by building temples 
and altars. 

In this way men came to worship Fire, and 
the Sun, and the River Nile, and the Moon, the 
Stars, the Ocean and many other things, calling 

[ 271 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


them gods, and building temples to them. And 
when some great leader of a tribe, who had done 
good to his people by driving off their enemies, 
died, and was buried beneath a momid of rock, 
men began after a time to think of this leader or 
hero as a god, too, because of his mighty deeds, 
and to believe that he still lived, in another world, 
and would help them if they prayed to him, in 
time of trouble. So not only did things like the 
Sun and the Moon become gods, but men, too, 
became gods, a different one in each tribe. These 
were the gods that men made because of grati¬ 
tude and love. 

The other kind of gods, the gods of fear, men 
created for the opposite reason. The storm, the 
serpent, the demons of disease, and darkness and 
death, all the things the peoples of those days 
feared, they worshipped too, not in gratitude for 
blessings they had received, but to ward off dan¬ 
ger and harm they thought might come to them. 

From these two causes, gratitude and fear, 
came the pagan gods. Men built great temples 
to these gods, with strange figures in them, and 
sacrificed to them food, and burnt offerings of 

[ 272 ] 



THEY WORSHIPPED IDOLS OF STONE 

[ 273 ] 



































GODS AND MEN 

sheep, and rams and bulls, and sometimes even 
human beings, to please the gods and ward off 
the dangers they feared. The priests of these 
temples had great power. Almost all knowledge 
and learning was in their hands. They held the 
secret of reading and writing. They cured the 
wounded and the sick. They claimed, through 
the oracles, to be able to read the future. Some¬ 
times they were even the rulers, as well as the 
priests, and the people feared them, because they 
claimed the power to bring down the anger of 
the gods on all who did not obey them. 

This power over the common people the priests 
kept up by all sorts of tricks which to the ig¬ 
norant seemed very wonderful indeed. They 
built idols which spoke, although the voice was 
that of a man hidden inside them. They built 
temples with whispering galleries, so that strange 
voices would seem to come out of the air. Hav¬ 
ing a knowledge of astronomy, they could foretell 
eclipses of the sun and moon, and told the people 
that at such and such a time these heavenly bodies 
would show their anger by hiding their faces. 
Knowing the position of the sun on the day ol 

[ 275 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


the vernal equinox in spring, and of the autumnal 
equinox in the fall, they arranged their altars so 
that at a certain moment on these days the sun’s 
rays, coming through a narrow slit in the wall of 
the temple would strike the centre of the altar, 
and this the people thought a great miracle. The 
priests of Ur, a very ancient city in Chaldea, not 
far from Babylon, who worshipped the Moon, 
arranged by means of mirrors to throw” a reflec¬ 
tion of the moon at a certain hour of the night 
each month, into a chair which was called the 
Moon God’s throne, and when people in the tem¬ 
ple saw this bright reflection of the moon sud¬ 
denly appear in the darkness, sitting in the mid¬ 
dle of the throne, they were terrified, believing 
that the moon itself had come down to earth to 
be worshipped by them. These are only a few 
of the many ways in which the priests used their 
knowledge to gain power over the people. 

But it is a strange thing that no matter how 
many priests and smaller gods the people had, 
they gradually came to believe in one chief god, 
stronger and more terrible than any of the lesser 
gods, whom they both loved and feared, because 

[ 276 ] 


GODS AND MEN 

they thought he could shower blessings on them, 
or harm and punish them, as he pleased. 

Such a great god or spirit we find at the back 
of nearly all the ancient religions. Men, without 
knowing why, came to believe that there must be 
this ruler of all things whom even the lesser gods 
feared and had to obey. 

Among the Greeks, this chief god was called 
Zeus, among the Romans, Jupiter, among the 
peoples of northern Europe, Odin, among the 
Egyptians, Aton, among the ancient Hebrews, 
Jahva, or Jehovah. Even the American Indians 
worshipped a Great Spirit. 

A very long time ago a certain Pharaoh of 
Egypt named Akhnaton made up his mind that 
there was really only one god, after all, and that 
the others, in spite of their temples and their 
priests, were not gods at all. This Pharaoh, 
who must have been a very wonderful man, or¬ 
dered the temples of the other gods to be closed, 
and their statues to be thrown down. The peo¬ 
ple, he commanded, must worship no one but 
Aton. For eighteen years he held out against 
the anger of the priests, who did not want their 

[ 277 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

temples closed, as it left them with nothing to do. 
Then he died, and his son-in-law, who came to 
the throne, went back to the old gods again. 

Another king, whose name was Nabonidas, 
tried the same thing in Babylon a thousand years 
later, but the priests were too strong for him, too, 
and the people continued to worship as they had 
before. 

But one tribe, a race of shepherds and nomads 
called the Hebrews, or Jews, also had the idea 
that there was but one god, the great Jehovah, 
strong and terrible, ready to shower blessings on 
those who obeyed and served him, but quick to 
punish those who disobeyed him. 

Wandering about as the Hebrews did, without 
temples or priests for a long time, they were 
better able to keep their faith in one God than 
the priest-ridden Egyptians and Babylonians 
were, and now almost all civilised peoples believe, 
as the Hebrews did, in one supreme and all- 
powerful God or Creator. 

The tribal gods of the early peoples were al¬ 
ways pictured by the priests as being very strong 
and terrible, full of wrath, which could only be 

[ 278 ] 


GODS AND MEN 


turned aside by strange sacrifices and burnt of¬ 
ferings, and this was just as true when they came 
to have one God, as when they had many. The 
priests had two reasons for doing this. One was 
to make the people obey. If they did not, the 
priests told them, God would be angry, and send 
down some awful fire, or storm, or sickness to 
punish them. That was the first reason. The 
second was to terrify their enemies. If one tribe 
had a stronger God than another, that tribe could 
always win, for their God would be there to help 
them. This made the people brave; they fought 
better, if they believed that they had the strong¬ 
est and most powerful God on their side. Even 
the ancient Hebrews believed this. They claimed 
that they were a chosen people, especially picked 
out by God for His care and protection, and in 
their history, as set forth in the earlier books of 
the Bible, there are many accounts of battles and 
difficulties of other sorts in which God helped 
them to overcome their enemies by personally 
coming to their aid. 

Thinking men and women to-day do not be¬ 
lieve that the God of all things, no matter by 

[ 279 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


what name we call Him, is on the side of any one 
people against another, but that He must look 
on all His children alike, a God of love, whom 
we do not have to please by making burnt offer¬ 
ings, but by doing what is right toward our fel¬ 
low men. 

In addition to the idea of a single God who 
ruled the world, the early peoples slowly came to 
have another idea—the belief that men after they 
died would live again. This is called immortality. 

When some great chief or leader had passed 
away and been placed in his tomb, the people, 
as we have seen, often came to think of him as 
a god, who would come back to help them in time 
of trouble. Believing this, they also had to be¬ 
lieve that he was still living, else how could he 
come back to help them. But since he was not 
living on earth, they thought he must be some¬ 
where up in the sky, since that was the only place, 
except the earth, that they knew anything about. 
So they pictured these hero-gods as living in a 
heaven somewhere up above. And naturally they 
thought that if the gods lived there, they them- 

[ 280 ] 



GODS AND MEN 

selves, when they died, could go and live there 
too. 

Each people, in these pictures they made of 
heaven, very naturally thought of doing, when 
they got there, the things they had most enjoyed 
doing on earth. 

The ancient Egyptians buried chariots and 
weapons of the chase in the tombs of their dead, 
because hunting was one of the royal sports of 
their kings, and they supposed they would hunt 
lions, and deer, in heaven, just as they had on 
earth. The American Indians had the same idea. 
Spending their lives as they did in fishing and 
hunting, they thought of heaven as a Happy 
Hunting Ground, full of all sorts of game. 

The fighting peoples of northern and central 
Europe were warriors. During the long, cold, 
winter evenings they sat about their banquet ta¬ 
bles in great halls, drinking mead made from 
honey, listening to the songs of their bards, tell¬ 
ing stories of victories in battle. So their idea of 
heaven was a place where great heroes sat about 
in just the same way, boasting of their victories. 

[ 281 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

The Hebrews, on the other hand, were a trad¬ 
ing instead of a fighting people. They were fond 
of gold, of silver, of jewels, of richly ornamented 
temples, of the music of cymbals and harps. So 
when they pictured heaven, they naturally sur¬ 
rounded themselves with all the things they 
loved, just as the other peoples did. The Turks 
and other worshippers of Mohammed dreamed of 
beautiful gardens, with food and drink, and 
lovely women to wait on them because those were 
the things they most prized on earth. 

So we see that each race and people had its 
own notion of what heaven should be. 

The important thing about these ideas of 
heaven among the different peoples is not that 
their ideas were different, but that they all be¬ 
lieved in life after death, and this belief we find 
in all the races of the earth. 

Belief in a single, all-powerful God or Crea¬ 
tor, and belief in a life after death, were the two 
great religious ideas worked out by the thinkers 
among the early peoples. These two beliefs lie at 
the root of all religion. 


[282] 


CHAPTER XX 


MUSIC 

When the first shepherd boy, tired of sitting 
alone all day watching his flocks, made a little 
pipe or whistle out of a hollow reed, and blew 
a few soft notes on it, he did not know that the 

I 

thing he had invented was to be the father of all 
wind instruments, down to the great organs that 
peal in our cathedrals and churches. 

And when the early man who discovered that 
a piece of string or gut, tightly stretched across 
a hollow gourd or shell, would give off a musical 
sound when struck or picked with the fingers, he 
did not know, either, that he had made an instru¬ 
ment that was to be the father of all stringed 
instruments down to the violin and the piano. 

But before either of these, the early men had 
found an even simpler way of making sounds, 
and that was by striking on hollow logs, having 
bits of skin tightly stretched over the ends of 

[ 283 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

them. These striking instruments, called tom¬ 
toms, or drums, were not exactly musical, but 
from them have developed cymbals, and other 
forms of instruments that are. 

In these three things, the shepherd’s pipe, the 
instrument with strings, the tom-tom, all music 
began. 

From the earliest times, music has had a won¬ 
derful effect on the minds and hearts of men. 
Under its influence they dreamed of love, of 
beauty. They became braver in battle. We all 
know how we feel when the band in a military 
parade sweeps by playing some stirring air or 
song. It was to fill the soldiers with courage and 
patriotism that they went into battle with bands 
playing, before war became a matter of trenches 
and dug-outs half a mile apart, as it is to-day. 
Different kinds of music can make us sad or gay, 
religious or reckless, sentimental or brave, as the 
case may be. For these reasons the early men 
were very fond of it. 

The growth of man’s knowledge of music was 
of course very slow, yet even in the most ancient 
times it filled a large part of the lives of the peo- 

[ 284 ] 


MUSIC 


pie. Whenever the early tribes wanted to have 
a feast, a celebration of any sort, even a religious 
one, they made use of music, and of the singing 
and dancing and clapping of hands which went 
with it. At first the people only chanted, or 
sang, but soon the reed pipe of the shepherd, the 
rude lyre or harp with its tightly drawn strings, 
the tom-tom or drum, came to be used in cele¬ 
brations of all sorts, just as they are used, in dif¬ 
ferent form, to-day. Even in the temples, song 
and music were used in worship, as they are used 
now. 

We can easily see that to dance—and all the 
early peoples were fond of dancing—there must 
be a certain beat, or rhythm, as it is called, just 
as there must be rhythm in the singing of a song, 
or the marching of men to battle, and hence one 
of the first things we find in music is this regular 
beat, or rhythm. After that came melody, which 
is the arrangement of musical notes in a varying 
order, or pitch. You can see how this is when 
you whistle; you do not always whistle the same 
note, but change it, to make it sound pleasing. 
In this way is formed a melody, or tune. But 

[ 285 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

I 

what may seem melody to one person, or race, 
may sound harsh and unpleasant to another, just 
as Chinese music sounds harsh and unpleasant to 
us, and ours, no doubt, to them. 

Among the early peoples, then, tunes and airs 
having a regular beat or rhythm were used for 
the songs of the bards, for dancing and feasting, 
for religious worship, and for war. And as in 
those far-off days these four things were about 
all the people did, we can see that they used 
music very much indeed. 

Before long the first tom-toms or drums 
changed to musical gongs, cymbals of brass, so 
often mentioned in the Bible, and later, to tam¬ 
bourines, and many other instruments. 

At the same time, the earliest form of stringed 
instruments soon became such things as the lyre, 
or psaltery and the harp. Both the psaltery and 
the harp are spoken of in the Bible, and a form 
of harp made of a hollow wooden box with an 
arm fixed to it holding four strings was used in 
Egypt in very ancient times. The Chinese, too, 
used stringed instruments, made by stretching 

[ 286 ] 


MUSIC 


a great number of strings or wires, sometimes as 
many as twenty-five, across a table having a hol¬ 
low top, to increase the sound. 

Among the Greeks the favourite instrument 
was the lyre, made in the shape of the letter “U,” 
with a bar across the top, and strings stretched 
from this bar to the bottom of the “U.” 

The pipes of the early shepherds, first made 
of a single reed, soon were made of a number 
joined together side by side, some longer, some 
shorter, and each giving a different note. The 
player moved his lips quickly from one reed to 
another, making a simple melody. But it was 
soon found that by using only one reed or pipe, 
and boring a number of holes in the side of it, the 
note given out could be changed by opening or 
stopping up these holes with the fingers. From 
this came such instruments as the piccolo, and the 
flute. 

The earliest horns were made of the horns of 
oxen, and it is from this that they take their 
name. But as soon as metals came into use, horns 
were made of copper, and bronze, and brass, and 

[ 287 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


even of silver and gold, just as they are now. All 
the brass instruments you see in a band to-day 
came from the little shepherd’s pipe. 

The instruments which were played by striking 
on them, the tom-toms and drums, became cym¬ 
bals and gongs, as we have seen. But soon men 
found out other ways of making music by strik¬ 
ing on things. The Chinese used rows of metal 
or porcelain bells, little ones at one end, running 
up to big ones at the other, all hung from a 
wooden bar. By striking on these bells with a 
mallet, musical notes and melodies could be made. 
Other peoples used blocks or bars of hard wood, 
arranged in the same way, and many instruments 
of this sort are still in use. In South America 
they have one called the marimba, and you may 
have had something of the sort, a row of little 
metal plates or bars to be struck with a hammer, 
among your toys. It is called a xylophone. 

The instruments with strings were first picked 
with the fingers, as harps and guitars and man¬ 
dolins are picked to-day. Later on, the bow was 
invented, strung with horsehair, and scraped 
along the strings of such instruments as the vio- 

[ 288 ] 


MUSIC 


lin. Sometimes the strings were neither picked 
nor scraped, but struck with tiny hammers of 
wood. An instrument of this sort, called a cem¬ 
balo, is often used in Hungarian orchestras. 

To make the picking of the strings easier, the 
clavichord was invented. In this instrument 
there is a keyboard, or row of keys like those on 
a piano. When a key is struck an arm at the 
other end of it flies up. On the end of this arm 
is fixed a little quill, or brass tip, which picks the 
strings of a harp laid flat in a wooden case. Clav¬ 
ichords are not used to-day. They were first 
made hundreds of years ago. But from them 
came the modern piano. 

As we have seen, music played a great part in 
the lives of the ancient peoples. Some sacred 
songs were supposed to work miracles, such as 
making it rain. Others were thought to ward off 
diseases and death. Still others were supposed 
to give the player or singer power to make ani¬ 
mals or other men do as he wished. We all re¬ 
member the songs of the Sirens, against which 
Ulysses stopped his ears so as not to hear their 
melodies. In the Bible, the sound of trumpets 

[ 289 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


caused the walls of the City of Jericho to fall. 
Among the Greeks, the songs of Orpheus were 
said to cause wild animals to lose their fierceness 
and follow him about. From such ancient myths 
we can see how great an interest the early peo¬ 
ples took in music. 




[290] 



CHAPTER XXI 


NUMBERS 

Just as people in ancient times learned to 
write, so they learned to count—to gain a knowl¬ 
edge of numbers. 

If a man had three sheep, and lost one of them, 
he had to be able to count, in order to know that 
one was gone and only two were left. If he had 
not he would soon have been without any sheep 
at all. He learned to count, so that he might 
keep track of what he possessed, whether it was 
sheep, or oxen, or arrows, or measures of grain. 

At first man could count only two—himself, 
and some one else. His mind would not go be¬ 
yond that. But before long he was able to count 
up to ten. 

If you had lived in those days, and had wanted 
to count, let us say, the number of birds you 
had shot with your bow and arrows, the easiest 

[ 291 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


way for you to have counted would have been 
on your fingers. And because you have ten fin¬ 
gers, you would have counted things by tens. 
This is just what men did, in early times, and 
they have been doing so ever since, although there 
is another and later way of counting by twelves, 
and to-day we have twelve inches in a foot. 

When, in counting on your fingers, you had 
reached ten, you could have gone no further, hav¬ 
ing no more fingers, so you would have had to 
begin all over again. But for each ten you 
counted, you would of course have made some 
sort of a mark. You might have made a cross, 
like the letter “X,” and that, as you of course 
know, is the sign for ten in the Roman system 
of numbers, and is used even now to mark the 
hour of ten on the faces of watches and clocks. 

After the fingers came what is called the 
abacus—rows of little coloured balls strung on 
wires in a frame, to make counting easier. Such 
counting machines are used to this day in China 
and in Russia. By moving the little balls up and 
down along the wires, it was possible to keep 
count of things up to a certain point, but a system 

[ 292 ] 



BEFORE THE DAYS OF THE TRACTOR 

[ 293 ] 

























-V 




\ 





NUMBERS 


of written numbers was as necessary to the early 
civilised peoples as was a system of letters for 
writing. 

Among the people of Babylon, who wrote in 
wedge-shaped marks on tablets of clay, the Phoe¬ 
nicians, whose many-oared ships sailed out of 
Tyre to found the great city of Carthage, and the 
Egyptians of the valley of the Nile, it was usual 
to make a single straight mark, up and down, 
for 1, two marks for 2, and so on up to 10, for 
which they had a special sign. After that they 
began all over again, adding a straight mark to 
the sign for ten in order to make eleven, adding 
two straight marks for twelve, and so on up to 
nineteen. For twenty they either used a new 
mark, or a double ten mark, as the Romans did 
when writing twenty thus, XX. And so on. 

The Romans and Greeks made this simpler by 
using for 5, instead of five straight lines, the 
letter Y. You all know how to write these 
Roman numbers, up to 50, which is L, and 100, 
which is C. 

But these Roman letters were rather clumsy 
for quick figuring, such as we do to-day, and so 

[295] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

there came into use the system of numbers we now 
employ. 

Just where our modern system of numbers 
came from is not clear. It was brought into 
Europe by the Arabs, that talented people from 
the sandy plains of Arabia, who at one time con¬ 
quered the clay country of Sumer and Sargon, 
and built a great city not far from ancient Baby¬ 
lon called Bagdad. No doubt you have all read 
about Bagdad in the “Arabian Nights.” 

But just where the Arabs got this system of 
numbers we do not know. There are ancient in¬ 
scriptions or markings on the walls of caves in 
India, which contain many numbers almost 
exactly like those we use at the present time. 
Such numbers may have first been used in India, 
but whoever invented them, the most valuable 
thing about them was the use of the “0,” or zero. 

If you think for a moment you will see why 
this is so. Take the figure 1 and put a zero after 
it and we have 10. Take a 3 and put a zero 
after it and we have 30. Take a 9 and put a 
zero after it and we have 90. Take a 1 and put 
two zeros after it and we have 100. Put three 

[296] 


NUMBERS 


zeros after it and we have 1,000. With six zeros 
we can write 1,000,000, that is, a million. And 
so on. Think how simple that is compared with 
the Babylonian system of straight marks, or even 
the improved system of the Greeks and Romans. 
It was the invention of the zero, placed after the 
other nine figures we use, that made all our vast 
system of numbers, our addition, subtraction, 
multiplication and division possible. Millions 
and billions of figures, written down each day in 
account books and calculations, in banks and fac¬ 
tories and stores, make up the business of the 
world. Just imagine trying to keep all these ac¬ 
counts in the system of numbers used by the 
Phoenicians, or the Egyptians. We can write 
down a billion almost as easily as we can ten, just 
by adding more zeros, but the ancient Egyptians 
had to have special pictures for the higher num¬ 
bers. When they wanted to write a hundred 
thousand, they made a picture of a frog. A mil¬ 
lion was a man with his arms stretched out in 
admiration. The man who first thought of using 
the zero, in a system of numbers, was one of the 
great inventors and thinkers of the world. 

[297] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

As man learned how to count, he also had to 
learn how to measure things, and to weigh them. 
So he invented measures of length, or distance, 
such as the foot and yard, measures of volume, 
such as the bushel, or gallon, and measures of 
weight, such as the ounce or pound, and at the 
same time he began to make use of scales. 

The first measures of length or distance, were 
taken from the human body. The Hebrews 
called the width of a man’s finger a digit; four 
digits, or the width of his hand, was called a palm. 
Three palms made a span, and two spans, a cubit. 
The Egyptian cubit was about twenty and a half 
inches long, and contained twenty-eight digits, or 
seven palms. The foot was originally the length 
of a man’s foot. 

We can see at once that a man’s palm, or his 
span, or his foot would not be very useful meas¬ 
ures, unless all men’s palms were the same width, 
their feet the same length. But of course they are 
not, and so it became the custom to make a bar 
or rod of the fixed or standard length that was 
agreed on, and place it in the temple, or the king’s 
treasury, from which all had to take the lengths 

[298] 


NUMBERS 


of the various measures they used. When every¬ 
body’s yardstick was the same, a person could 
buy a yard of cloth without being cheated. 
And the same thing was true of weights, and 
measures. 

This may perhaps seem very old-fashioned, but 
it is exactly what we do to-day. In the United 
States, in Great Britain, in France and other 
countries, standards of length, of volume, and of 
weight are fixed by the government just as they 
were in ancient times. The English standard of 
length is a bronze bar one yard long divided into 
feet and inches, and carefully kept by the govern¬ 
ment so that every one may know just how long 
a yard should be. In the United States, although 
the yard is also used, the meter is a standard, as 
it is in France, and there are standard pounds 
and gallons and bushels which it is against the law 
to change, just as in Bible times there were stand¬ 
ard shekels and cubits. 

With the use of weights came the use of scales. 
They were probably first employed in weighing 
such things as silver and gold. Grains of barley 
were used, in the beginning, for making the little 

[299] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


pans of the scales balance—a pinch of gold dust, 
perhaps, on one side, a few barley-corns on the 
other. It was from this use of grains of barley 
that the weight called the grain got its name. 

So we see that as man gathered possessions, 
such as cattle, and sheep, and goats, he had to 
find ways to number or count them, and as he 
grew grain, he had to have measures to measure 
it out in when trading, and when he built build¬ 
ings, he had to have cubits, and digits, and palms, 
with which to draw his plans and measure his 
timbers and stones, and when he came to trade in 
gold and silver, he had to have scales to weigh 
it in, and weights to see how much it weighed. 
All these things man added to his store of knowl¬ 
edge, in the far-off days before the beginning of 
history. 


[ 300 ] 


CHAPTER XXII 


A DAY IN EGYPT 4,000 YEARS AGO 

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the 
early peoples, by the time what we now call his¬ 
tory began, had stored up a great mass of val¬ 
uable knowledge, and this knowledge, patiently 
gathered by hundreds of thousands of unknown 
thinkers, we are all of us making use of to-day. 

Some of this knowledge, as we now know, was 
handed down century after century, by word of 
mouth, by fathers and mothers teaching their 
children the secrets of their crafts. Some came 
to us in books, in rolls of parchment or papyrus, 
in inscriptions on clay tablets, or on the walls of 
temples and tombs. And some we have learned 
from the relics found in the ruins of ancient cities 
—little things of every-day life which the men and 
women and children of those far-off times made 
and handled and used. 

[301] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

Much of the knowledge which has come to us 
in books we owe to the ancient Greeks. We have 
already read about Hippocrates, the father of 
Medicine. Some day you will read the works of 
Plato, the philosopher, and of Aristotle, his pupil, 
who was the teacher of Alexander the Great, 
When you study geometry, you will be studying 
problems worked out long ago by Euclid, who 
was a Greek, although he lived in the city of 
Alexandria, in Egypt, where the great library 
that was burned had its home. The works of the 
Greek playwrights, Sophocles, iEschylus, Eurip¬ 
ides, Aristophanes, are still read and their plays 
performed. But the writings of these men be¬ 
long rather to historical times than to that great 
period of time of which we have been reading, 
and of which we have no record, except those 
glimpses here and there which come to us through 
the discovery of some long-forgotten palace, or 
temple, or tomb. 

These glimpses show us, however, that the 
people of long ago were very far from being 
ignorant, even though they did not have motor 
cars, and airships, and submarines. Such peoples 

[302] 


A DAY IN EGYPT 4,000 YEARS AGO 

as the Phoenicians, the Babylonians, the Cretans, 
the Hebrews, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the 
Chinese and others were in certain ways quite as 
highly civilised as we are. In the carving and 
working of wood and of metals, in certain 
branches of pottery and glass making, in sculp¬ 
ture and in the cutting and engraving of gems, 
in dyeing and weaving, and in many other things, 
we know T that they were ahead of us, for we find 
examples of their work, in tombs and elsewhere, 
more beautiful than anything of the sort we make 
to-day. We live in an age of machinery. Things 
are made in a hurry, for the sake of the money 
they will bring. In ancient times people were 
not so hurried. They worked slowly, with their 
hands, and whatever they made, from a glass bead 
to the statue of a god, from a carved and gilded 
chair to a mighty temple of stone, they tried to 
make as beautiful, and as lasting, as they could. 
We, in this day, are apt to pay too much attention 
to what is useful, too little to what is beautiful 
and worth while. 

Many of the things these early peoples knew, 
much of the knowledge they stored up, was lost 

[303] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

to us, during the Dark Ages in Europe, and had 
to be discovered over again. For instance, the 
ancient Chaldeans of whom we have spoken, who 
lived in the clay country not far from Babylon, 
had a great city called Ur. The priests of the 
temple of the Moon God in that city had a con¬ 
siderable knowledge of astronomy, as did also the 
ancient Chinese, and yet the people of Europe a 
few hundreds of years ago knew nothing about 
it. It is strange indeed to think that men could 
calculate eclipses of the sun and moon seven thou¬ 
sand years ago, and yet not know, in Columbus’s 
time, that the earth was round. Such things as 
gunpowder, or the mariner’s compass, by which 
ships are steered at sea, were known to the 
Chinese and the Arabs long before the people of 
Europe knew anything about them. We think 
of our great office buildings, fifty stories high, as 
very wonderful works, yet the pyramids of 
Egypt, which have already braved the storms of 
between five and six thousand years, will be 
standing for thousands more, when every office 
building in the world will have crumbled to dust. 
So do not let us think, even though our civilisa- 

[304] 


A DAY IN EGYPT 4,000 YEARS AGO 

tion to-day is in many ways a very wonderful one, 
that we have nothing to learn from the past. 

Even the women, in those far-off days, had 
most of the things, and did most of the things, 
that women have and do in our own times. They 
used mirrors of polished silver, instruments, such 
as scissors, for taking care of the nails, face pow¬ 
der and rouge on their cheeks and lips, furs and 
jewels, and even flounces and corsets, as we see 
plainly from certain little figures which have 
been dug up on the Wonderful Island of Crete. 

The sailors of those ancient days, even in their 
small ships, were hardy and brave. The Phoeni¬ 
cians made long voyages. Certain of them, act¬ 
ing for one of the rulers of Egypt, sailed out of 
the Mediterranean and navigated all the way 
around the great continent of Africa. The 
workers in metals made sword blades so finely 
tempered that they could be bent in a circle with¬ 
out breaking. The blowers of glass discovered 
and used colours which cannot be equalled by any 
chemist or glass-maker to-day. Houses were 
lighted by candles, or lamps, just as they were 
a hundred years ago, and in the same way wood 

[305] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


was used for fuel. They had water works, just 
as we have now, and great public baths, finer 
than anything we know. They even had bath¬ 
tubs, with pipes supplying hot and cold water, 
as discoveries in Crete have shown, and by exer¬ 
cising and bathing took better care of their health 
than many of us do to-day. It is strange to think 
that in England at the time of Shakespeare, and 
in America at the time of Washington, bath-tubs 
were practically unknown. 

The children in those days had toys, too, to 
play with; dolls made of wood and of clay, of 
metal and of stone, some of them with jointed 
arms, just as we make them now. They had 
wooden figures of animals, such as elephants, 
cows, goats, they had rattles and tops, kites and 
boats, marbles and whistles. They even played 
ball and some of these ancient balls have been 
found in Egypt, covered with leather as we cover 
them, and stuffed with hair. They had jumping- 
jacks, too, and doll’s furniture and china beauti¬ 
fully carved and painted. In every country of 
the world, from the most ancient times, children 
have had their toys. 


[ 306 ] 



















































A DAY IN EGYPT 4,000 YEARS AGO 

So we see that the earth’s story, the story of 
its civilisation, is a very ancient one, and not a 
thing of yesterday. And in those far-off times 
people lived pleasant and useful and happy lives, 
just as they do now. Let us see, for a moment, 
just what life in those far-off days was. 

It happens that we are able to do this better 
in Egypt than we are in any of the other coun¬ 
tries of ancient times, because of the custom the 
Egyptians had of burying all sorts of things in 
their tombs. And particularly because of dis¬ 
coveries made in the tomb of an ancient Egyptian 
named Mehenkwetre, who lived about four thou¬ 
sand years ago in the great city of Thebes on the 
banks of the Nile. 

This man Mehenkwetre was very rich. Like 
all Egyptians in those days, he believed that 
when he died, his wandering spirit (or rather one 
of his wandering spirits, for the Egyptians 
thought that men had several) would return to 
his tomb from time to time on a visit. So he 
caused his workmen to carve during his lifetime 
many little figures, like dolls, beautifully made 
and painted, of himself, his family, and all the 

[309] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

servants and other people who served and waited 
on him. 

He did this., so that these figures could be 
placed in his tomb when he died, and he believed 
that when his wandering spirit came to visit the 
tomb, it would have the power to make all these 
little dolls come to life, to wait on him. He 
wanted to have, when he was dead, the same com¬ 
forts he enjoyed while he was living, so he took 
care to see that his butchers and his bakers, his 
brewers and his farmers, his cattle and his 
herders, and even his sailors with their boats, were 
all there to serve him when he had need of them. 

So Mehenkwetre had all these figures carved, 
including those of himself and his son, and when 
he died, they were placed in his tomb, along with 
his mummied body, to stay there untouched for 
over four thousand years. Not long ago the 
tomb was opened and the dolls found, and from 
them we are able to get a very wonderful and 
exact picture of what the daily life of a rich 
gentleman in Egypt was, so long ago. Some of 
these figures, of which there were a great many, 
are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 

[310] 


A DAY IN EGYPT 4,000 YEARS AGO 

New York City, where we can see them, grouped 
as though carrying out their daily tasks. 

Mehenkwetre no doubt rose early, being a busy 
man, and after a bath in the pool in his garden, 
breakfasted on fruits, bread, and stewed meats 
and fish. Then he set about the duties of the day. 

One of these duties was to inspect his cattle, his 
stock. We see him in one of the groups, sitting 
on the porch of his house, with his son beside him. 
Through the courtyard in front of the house, his 
herders are bringing a drove of cattle. There are 
clerks near by, with rolls of papyrus in their 
hands, on which, no doubt, was set down a list of 
the cattle, their number and kind, so that they 
might be checked up, to see that none had been 
stolen or lost. There are a dozen or more 
servants in this group, and some twenty animals, 
all painted to their exact colours. Some of the 
cattle are white, with brown or black spots, and 
have long straight horns. The herdsmen wear 
single garments of white linen tied about their 
waists, leaving their arms, shoulders and legs 
bare. The little scene looks like a picture of real 
life. 


[ 311 ] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 


Other groups show scenes in his stables, where 
busy servants are feeding and fattening animals 
for the table. Mehenkwetre must have liked good 
things to eat, judging from the fatness of his 
oxen. 

Presently we see the animals being slaughtered 
and cut up into sections, which are hung on hooks 
in the air to cool. Everybody is very busy, and 
we can imagine that the master of the house saw 
that they did not sit about with idle hands. Yet 
they all look well-fed and happy. 

In another place we see the dairy. Here cows 
are being milked by careful slaves, who no doubt 
made their reports to Mehenkwetre’s wife, as did 
the women we see spinning flax into thread for 
making fine white linen. Everything was made 
on the place. There is a bakery, showing the 
grain being ground into flour by women, using 
a hand mill, and the baker kneading it into loaves 
and placing them in the oven to bake. The bins 
in which the grain was kept are also shown, with 
slaves filling the bins from sacks, the number of 
which are being written down by clerks, for the 
master’s watchful eye. There is even a brewery, 

[312] 


A DAY IN EGYPT 4,000 YEARS AGO 

in which all the steps of making beer are shown, 
from grinding the barley to pouring the finished 
liquid into jugs. We see that Mehenkwetre lived 
well, and set much store by the pleasures of life. 

One of the little boats shows us that the great 
man was fond of hunting and fishing. It is a 
beautifully modelled craft, with high bow and 
stern and the flat bottom needed for sailing on 
the shallow waters of the Nile. The slaves in 
the crew are very busy spearing game, catching 
fish and wild fowl with nets. The master himself 
does not fish, nor does his son, for we see them 
sitting beneath a canopy, watching the sport. 

One of the boats was used only for cooking. 
No doubt the smell of frying fish would have 
been offensive to the great man’s nostrils, so the 
floating kitchen was left in the rear, until meal¬ 
time came, when it was called alongside, and the 
slaves with which the boat was crowded came 
aboard with their dishes. 

These boats were rowed with oars, and steered 
by means of a great swinging rudder oar, 
fastened to an upright post at the stern. One 
of the largest of them is a pleasure boat, and 

[313] 


THE FIRST DAYS OF KNOWLEDGE 

beneath a richly decorated canopy at one end of 
it Mehenkwetre and his son sit in the heat of the 
day, protected from the sun, while singers and 
musicians perform for their amusement. Life 
for a rich Egyptian, in those days, must have 
been a very easy and pleasant one. 

In the evening, no doubt, Mehenkwetre and 
his family sat among the fruit trees of his walled 
garden, feeding the fish in the pool, while harp¬ 
ists played the popular songs of the day, or 
friends came in to talk over the latest bit of court 
gossip. He was a great man. He ate and slept 
and lived and married and died, four thousand 
years ago, very much as we do to-day. Whether 
he was a good man or a bad one, whether his life 
was a success or a failure, we do not know. But 
in his day, as in our own, only one thing is really 
important—not when we live, nor where, but 
how. 

END OF VOLUME TWO 


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